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Witness of denial 




VIDA D. SCUDDER 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



THE 

WITNESS OF DENIAL 



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VIDA D. SCUDDER, A.M. 



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NEW-YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

3 I WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 

1895 






Copyright, 1895, 
By E. p. button & COMPANY. 



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PREFACE 



This little book is an abridgment of 
lectures given at Wellesley College during 
a course of instruction on modern English 
prose-writers. It may seem strange that 
thought so avowedly and entirely religious 
should find place in the study of Hterature ; 
but the century is to blame rather than the 
lecturer. It was impossible to teach mod- 
ern English prose ignoring such men as 
John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Cardinal New- 
man, Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison, 
Frederic Denison Maurice, and Matthew 
Arnold ; it was equally impossible to gain 
intelligent understanding of the work of 
these men and their relation to their age 
without some treatment of their intellec- 



4 PREFACE. 

tual and ethical background. Lectures on 
the different phases of modern religious 
thought in England alternated, therefore, 
with critical studies of various authors on 
the part of the class. The lectures proved 
useful to the students ; they are presented 
here to a wider public. The critical ac- 
companiment has been discarded, except 
in occasional choice of illustration; and the 
impersonal presentation of thought, suit- 
able to the lecture, has been supple- 
mented and modified by frank judgment 
and comment. 

The tone of the book throughout will 
be found, indeed, candidly Christian and 
Catholic. It were easy to disguise private 
conviction and to give a seemingly im- 
partial treatment of great themes. Such 
a method may appear more dispassionate; 
it is assuredly less simple and less sincere. 
Personal bias is sure to exist, whether be- 
trayed or not; better confess it at the 
outset. In a fair mind such bias may 



PREFACE. 5 

help analysis instead of destroying jus- 
tice ; and there is no reason why readers 
should distrust an author because he ac- 
knowledges what he might have con- 
cealed. The Christian turns with eager 
interest to the revelations of the earnest 
agnostic, grateful for the privilege to see 
for a time through his eyes and gain a 
better and more sympathetic understand- 
ing of his point of view; the agnostic may 
surely follow a like impulse and gain a like 
advantage in wider outlook by turning to 
the reflection of his own thought as seen 
in the thought of the Christian. 

But these modest and short pages will 
hardly appeal to the thorough agnostic ; 
they speak, too often, a language strange 
to him, which he will reject as fantastic 
and unreal. The book is meant for those 
who seek, not those who are at rest ; per- 
haps, indeed, it could reach no one who is 
not already earnestly washing to accept 
Christianity. Even so, the number of 



6 PREFACE. 

those to whom it is directed is very 

great. Should it give one helpful hint 

to three, or two, or one of that number, 

its existence will be justified. 

ViDA D. SCUDDERo 
Trinity-tide, 1895. 



THE WITNESS OF DENIAL, 



O God of Truth, 
Make me one with Thee in eternal love. 
Oft am I weary, reading, listening, 
But all I wish and long for is in Thee 
Then silent be all teachers, hushed be all creation 

at the sight of Thee. 
Speak Tliou to me alone. 

Thomas a Kempis. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Preface 3 

I. 

The Movement of Doubt 11 

II. 
The Rexascexce of Faith S3 

III. 
The Religion of Mystery 51 

IV. 
The Religion of Humanity 71 

V. 

The Religion of Morality 97 

VI. 
The Religion of Christ 131 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT, 



You call for faith : 
I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists. 

Browning. 



THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 



I. 

THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 

Never, probably, has any century been 
so vigorous in mechanical activities as that 
which is slipping from our grasp; yet none 
has ever cared more strenuously for spirit- 
ual things. It has produced the modern 
system of business and competitive trade ; 
it has also produced great movements in 
thought and faith and art. We may wail 
as we will over our passion for riches, our 
pursuit of ease. We may sink into pro- 
found discouragement as; passing swiftly 
through the streets of a modern city, we 



14 THE 1VITNESS OF DENIAL, 

realize the vast industrial energies devoted 
to life's mere machine, the comfort of the 
senses. But the instant that we pause we 
are conscious of a breath of power blow^- 
ing perpetually through all our more ma- 
terial activities, to quicken, to purify, some- 
times to destroy. The world of the spirit 
is dying no weary death; it is ''mewing 
its mighty youth." 

Do we ask for proof? We look at the 
great religious movements which during 
the century have shaken the souls of 
men — the Catholic Movement in France, 
the Oxford Movement in England, and 
that present social renascence which, con- 
sciously or not, finds source and spring 
in the Christian passion. We note the 
indirect witness of the eager haste with 
which every new activity, from a theory 
of science to a mode of writing fiction, 
has been dragged into the presence of 
religion and forced to define its relation to 
the spiritual life. Above all, we think of 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 15 

literature — that great modern literature of 
every country of Europe, with its som- 
ber brooding over psychological problems, 
its spiritual unrest, its search for peace. 
Sometimes, as in the days of Homer, 
literature centers in the action of men; 
sometimes, as in the days of Shakespeare, 
it centers in their passions; to-day, as 
in the days of Dante, it centers in their 
souls. Whether Goethe in ''Faust" gives 
us man's pilgrimage through the wide 
world, or Heine in his lyrics man's w^ail 
from his prison ; w^hether Carducci and 
Hugo voice his cry of revolt, or Words- 
worth and George Eliot his joy in obedi- 
ence, through the whole sweep of modern 
literature interest is focused in the drama 
of the inner life. We see that this in- 
terest has been sustained and conscious if 
we think of the modern essay, as written 
by Mazzini, Carlyle, Arnold, Bourget; we 
see that it has been progressive as well if 
we trace the sequence of themes in the 



16 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

modern novel from Scott to Meredith, 
from Dumas to Daudet. 

But it is in the great movement of 
doubt that, paradoxicall}^ — and is not all 
life paradox? — the vitality of the spirit 
may be most clearly seen. For doubt 
is ever a sign of life, and never have 
men been so conscious of their souls as 
in this age when they are so fond of deny- 
ing them. Scarcity -value, as economists 
would say, rests to-day upon untroubled 
religious conviction. The man who pos- 
sesses it is grave, alert, and joyful, filled 
with gratitude for a gift granted to very 
few. Spiritual desire, not spiritual con- 
viction, is the prevailing modern mood. 
Where others adored we question ; where 
others obeyed we seek. '*The same ques- 
tion-mark," says a French writer, *' is for 
the modern world perpetually posed on a 
perpetually receding horizon." Between 
the Land of Conventions and the King- 
dom of Faith lies the wide region of Un- 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. IT 

certainty. In its gray mazes the men of 
the modern world have wandered, seeking 
and suffering. InteUigent and peaceful 
activity is not for him who lingers there. 
To traverse this country has been the lot 
of some, to pause in it the fate of many. 
The throngs who abide there can never 
rest, though they never attain. 

The century of Dante affirmed; the 
century of Voltaire denied. Our age has 
neither affirmed nor denied ; it has in- 
quired. There have been both loss and 
gain in our mood of challenge. '' Fight- 
ings within and fears without," as the old 
hymn puts it, have been our heritage ; but 
our generation deserves, perhaps more fully 
than any since the words were uttered, the 
blessing pronounced on those who hunger 
and thirst after righteousness. 

The same vigor which has shown itself 
in the increase of material energies, the 
extension of science, and the exploration 
of history is manifest in the passionate 



18 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

eagerness with which modern men have 
sought for truth. The movement of doubt 
has gathered to itself much of the best Hfe 
of the century. It has known a definite 
sequence with distinct successive phases ; 
and its history must be understood, not 
only philosophically, but humanly and 
simply, by those w^ho wish to be able to 
say, with Browning's aged prophet, '' The 
Future I may face, now I have known the 
Past." 

In the first years of the century the im- 
pulse of revolt and the love of humanity 
nearly sufficed the human soul. We can- 
not wonder at the passionate restlessness, 
the rebellion against tyranny, which is as 
much the key-note of religious as of social 
life. The Church — alas that we must say 
it! — stood seemingly committed on her 
thought-side to rigid and artificial dogma, 
on her social side to an aristocratic ideal. 
Most of the people who clung to her be- 
Heved conventionally ; a few — humble folk 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 19 

for the most part— believed fervently ; but 
nearly all the men of the future, the men 
vividly alive, made an exultant religion of 
freedom. The skeptical philosophies of 
the eighteenth century had prepared the 
way ; then came the French Revolution, 
and energized to passion in the many that 
conception which had been inert in the in- 
tellect of the few. Greek stories tell that 
the mortal w^ho surprised the face of 
oread or dryad was henceforth niim- 
pholeptos — possessed by a divine mad- 
ness. In the Revolution men beheld the 
face of Freedom; and though she van- 
ished like the fleeting nymph of the old 
mythology before her human pursuers, 
the mere vision was enough to inebriate 
them with celestial rapture. Shelley, for 
instance, is like a soul enchanted in the 
early years of the century ; he and the 
many of whom he is a type are possessed 
by the simple joy of revolt, rehgious and 
social. 



20 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

This stage of pure delight in escape 
from tyranny we have left far behind in 
our spiritual development. Something of 
it may linger in the intellectual provincial- 
ism of a man like IngersoU ; but the ablest 
and highest minds thrill no longer at the 
simple thought of freedom. The thought- 
movement of the age swept on. It de- 
veloped next, in reaction from emotional- 
ism, a phase akin to the dry temper of the 
eighteenth century. The philosophy of 
experience, as formulated mainly by the 
two Mills, father and son, is the direct 
forerunner of Darwinian philosophy. Al- 
ready, in its system, conscience is not the 
voice of God within, but the echo of 
ancestral wisdom ; religion has no objec- 
tive correlative, but is the projection of 
the human shadow on the mists of the 
unknown. Expediency, in a refined sense, 
is to be the guide of life, and physical ex- 
perience is the only basis of knowledge. 

The ''Autobiography" of John Stuart 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 21 

Mill shows us, with a revelation exqui- 
sitely dispassionate and mournful, just what 
conceptions of this order can make of 
human life. It is one of the strangest 
books of the century; surely, also, one of 
the saddest. It tells us with scientific 
precision the story of a nature starting on 
a high plane, with few moral temptations 
to conquer and no mental confusion to 
overcome. It shows this man achieving 
an immense amount of valuable work, 
practising not only exalted, but subtle 
virtue, convinced to the end with his de- 
liberate reason that life had yielded him 
as much of truth and joy and power as it 
had to offer a sincere intelligence. Yet 
no one can read the "Autobiography '' of 
Mill, or his admirable books, and feel that 
in him the century has found a full repre- 
sentative, or human nature been set free. 
We trace through the book itself a signifi- 
cant progress from entire complacency to 
a dim sense of want. The want is met, 



22 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

but only in part, by the poetry of Words- 
worth, with its pecuHar power to exalt all 
ethical emotions to the spiritual plane. As 
life goes on we feel that Mill gropes with 
more and more approach to consciousness 
after something not included in his philos- 
ophy. His unfinished essay on Theism 
strikes a new and wistful note. Yet he 
dies as he has lived, at rest within the 
limits of the natural reason. Spheres of 
experience which are the human heritage 
are closed to him. He is " shut out from 
the heaven of spirit." 

Definite in a world of bewilderment was 
the philosophy offered by Mill ; but popu- 
lar it could not be. Strange though it 
seem, even in this most practical of worlds 
men refuse long to live without certain 
intangible commodities which they call 
ideals. The lost faith, rich in sacred emo- 
tion and lofty hope, was ill replaced by 
allegiance to Utility. In the barren phi- 
losophy of experience the century could 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 23 

not rest. Its placid complacency is as 
much a thing of the past as the hot 
spirit of revolt which preceded and in 
part engendered it. Coldly mechanical, 
with nothing to quicken the imagination 
and little to fire the conduct, it was dying 
a natural death when an unexpected rein- 
forcement from an entirely different quarter 
gave it a mighty impulse, bestowed on it 
a quickening power, and sent it out into 
the world to conquer under the guise of 
modern science. 

It was not till i86i that Darwin pub- 
lished ''The Origin of Species." Before 
this time, as is evident from literature, 
evolutionary ideas were filtering through 
English thought ; from this time for a third 
of a century they became a controlling in- 
fluence in modern Europe. To prove this 
we have only to run over the table of con- 
tents of the chief magazines — sensitized 
plates as they are, swift to catch the reflec- 
tion of the age-sky above. Evolutionary 



24 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL. 

theory in relation to art, morals, educa- 
tion, religion, may be said to absorb atten- 
tion from i860 to about 1885. Slowly 
another theme emerges; and to-day so- 
ciology and economics replace science 
as the chief inciters to speculation. But 
under the power of evolutionary thought 
we have each and all been trained. It 
has produced a whole system of ethics. 
It has shaped the great men who have 
shaped us. It produced the type of non- 
Christian thought of which those just en- 
tering middle life are perhaps most vividly 
conscious. Its power may be waning, but 
it is mighty yet. 

To questioning souls, long starved on 
negations, science seemed at first, in its 
mere revelation of the physical universe, 
to offer a positive faith. The philosophy 
of experience had shut them within their 
own natures ; the theory of evolution set 
them free of the world. The old vision of 
the New Jerusalem was lost to men; but 



THE MOVEMENT OE DOUBT. 25 

here was a new vision to take its place. 
Gazing backward, uplifted above that life 
of which they were a part, their freed 
spirits beheld a stream of mysterious 
energy flowing, in whirls of ever more 
complex life, from star-dust up to man. 
They saw the Power pulse upward, from 
nebulous and inorganic chaos to the or- 
dered glory of the crystal earth ; on to the 
thrill of life in tree and blossom ; higher 
yet, till the silent gives response. On- 
ward still they saw it sweep, through 
simple forms of animal life where reflex 
nervous action alone hints what shall come 
— on till '' up the pinnacled glory leaped, 
and the pride of the soul was in sight"; 
till from the mass of inert matter was 
evolved the human race. 

No wonder that in the dazzle of this 
great earth-procession men forgot, for a 
time, to gaze into the heavens. No won- 
der that in the revelation of the vast sweep 
to time they cared not to question eternity. 



26 THE WITNESS OE DENIAL 

The very immensity of the evolutionary 
conception seemed at first to absorb atten- 
tion and still men into awe. 

But not for long. Soon it became evi- 
dent that in all the mighty sequence there 
was nothing to satisfy the soul ; that, long 
though the procession was which moved 
from seeming death to life, it issued from 
the void, and made, so far as the revela- 
tion of science was concerned, for dark- 
ness. For from shadows impenetrable on 
into a silence unbroken does the whirl of 
life revealed by science perpetually sweep. 
Thus the theory of evolution received, 
nourished, and recreated the philosophy 
of experience, and formed the next and 
strongest phase in the great negative 
movement of the century. 

For it seemed to almost all thinking 
men, in the first excitement of that vision, 
that science had established a presump- 
tion, nearly strong enough for proof, in 
favor of a material interpretation of life. 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 27 

All its wavering glory did but reveal and 
establish the supremacy of the sense. It 
showed, far back in the dim region of 
origins, miatter alone, matter supreme. 
Once given the primordial atom, and force 
to work thereon, it seemed, to hasty in- 
ference, a mere matter of time to produce 
humanity. The old conception of a series 
of special creations vanished once for all ; 
it was replaced by the strange picture 
of a w^orld seemingly evolving itself, by 
its own power, from chaos to order, from 
nebula to man. The universal reign of 
Law seemed to rule out the possibility of 
miracle. The physical nature of man was 
seen to be derived, according to certain 
law^, from the glutinous unity of the jelly- 
fish ; could not his honesty, purity, kind- 
ness, be traced back in like manner to 
the first instinct of self-preservation in 
the species? Instead of descending from 
above, had not the moral nature ascended 
from below? The first teaching of evolu- 



28 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

tion seemed cogently to confirm that 
which a radical philosophy had up to 
this time merely hinted ; seemed to de- 
clare that body was not the servant of 
soul, but soul the slave of body ; that 
mind was at best and highest a mere 
function of brain-activity, and that when 
brain once returned to the dust whence 
it was formed, mind, its shadow-action, 
would vanish, even as Plato questioned 
long ago, like music when the instrument 
is mute. 

Thus science, as at first superficially 
conceived, seemed to banish God and im- 
mortality and to strengthen the movement 
of negation. Starting with the analytical 
temper of the eighteenth century, rein- 
forced by the revolutionary passion, sanc- 
tioned by the criticism of the philosophy 
of experience, the movement might yet 
have fallen by its own weight but for this 
mighty help. The scientific temper, foe 
to all conventions, exalted the impulse of 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT, 29 

denial to the duty of inquiry ; the recog- 
nition of the reign of natural law strength- 
ened the revulsion from artificial creeds. 
Our knowledge showed the seemingly tiny 
part we play in the system of nature ; our 
ignorance suggested the vast sw^eep of 
truth outside our ken ; and the agnostic 
temper was born. 

Agnosticism ! Dismal though humble 
title, denying, not that spirit exists, but 
that spirit can be known. Hardly a title 
in which to glory, since it implies that 
man is little and that truth is great. Un- 
luckily those who adopt it give to the 
term at times the reverse significance, 
meaning that man is great and that noth- 
ing is important or essential which he can- 
not understand. But the spirit of the true 
scientific agnostic was from the first in- 
tellectual and sober, moderated by the 
caution which will know only what it 
can prove. It was to be still further dis- 
ciplined, as w^ell as still further strength- 



30 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

ened, by influence from a new quarter. 
To the witness of metaphysical speculation 
and of natural science was to be added 
the witness of history. More direct than 
denial based on the revelation of the laws 
of nature, a new denial, based on the evi- 
dence of the story of man, took up the 
work of negation. The critical school, re- 
jecting not only the assumptions but the 
facts of Christianity, destroyed credence in 
the authenticity of the documents which 
are the only witnesses of the Christian 
faith. Under this new influence the spirit 
of the agnostic movement soon altered. 
From fierce argument it passed into quiet 
assumption. To the minds of its advo- 
cates the cause of denial was won ; and it 
became possible for a wTiter on theology 
brought up on Christian traditions and 
sensitive to Christian ideals to take as 
starting-point for his thought the state- 
ment that ''miracles do not happen," on 
the ground that discussion of truisms is 



THE MOVEMENT OF DOUBT. 31 

waste of time. Modern agnosticism began 
as pure instinct of escape and rebellion; it 
passed into philosophical theory, thence 
into assertions concerning historic facts ; 
and its strong sequence was complete. 



II. 

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH 



Power was with me in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the lights 
And dwells not in the light alone. 

In MemoriaMc 



II. 

THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 

The sun and the heavens are hidden. 
Over our heads extends a low curtain of 
vapor, heavy with the wrong of earth and 
gray with its sorrows. Among us there 
is Hght, dim and shadowless ; there is 
warmth, for we live ; but the Source of 
light and warmth we cannot see. Our 
heaven is but the exhalation of the earth, 
and unchanging and mournful is the light 
that streams through it. Yet, gazing up- 
ward into the mists, men exclaim with 
triumph that the world is growing larger 
to our sight. There was a time when all 
was defined, distinct ; when great moun- 
tains leaped upward, radiant, into the 
smooth blue sky, and a far, sharp hori- 

35 



36 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL, 

zon-Hne showed where earth impinged on 
heaven. Behold, all boundaries are swept 
away; there is nothing to impede our 
vision, and, unhampered by interruptions, 
our eyes, turn them where we will, peer 
serenely into infinite space. 

We have watched the upward sweep of 
the cloud enshrouding us, the develop- 
ment of the modern movement of denial. 
In a thought-world where all, even the 
sky, is the output of our own earthliness 
many people recognize light, but claim 
that it has no location. Others, ignor- 
ing it, center thoughts and love in that 
humanity which it reveals. And some 
there are who, haunted by dim memories, 
mourn forever a vanished sun. 

The impulsive rapture of revolt with 
which the agnostic movement was initiated 
could not long endure. Before a third of 
the century was over this mood had died, 
and vacancy ceased to inspire exultation. 

No age, perhaps, h^s known deeper 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 37 

Spiritual agony than our own, or voiced 
more poignant cries of reiterated pain. 
Many of our noblest spirits have turned 
cynical and fierce of soul; many — and 
these the most exquisite — are paralyzed 
in the very nerves of life; many take 
refuge in silence. 

** Be silent, heart. What if thy pain be great, 
What if thine anguish cannot be forgot. 
Thy questions cannot sleep, thy doubtings wait? 
It matters not. 

** Think'st thou that in the universal woe 

Which holds the world's great heart, thy tiny jot 
Of anguish counts for aught? I tell thee, no. 
It matters not. 

*' Then, O my heart, be silent! If thou die 
Because the flame within thee burn so hot, 
Die silently ; for if thou live or die. 
It matters not." 

Thus mourns at last the soul which 
long has stood, as Carlyle puts it, '' shout- 
ing question after question into the sibyl- 
cave of Destiny, to receive no answer but 
an echo.'* 



38 THE WITNESS OF DENIAL, 

Yet not all of these echo-servants, these 
children of loss, are silent or sorrowful. 
Some of them exult in the very still- 
ness which meets their questioning cries. 
While some of the votaries of denial have 
suffered, others have triumphed. The 
denial of old faiths has become a banner 
around which have rallied praise, fidelity, 
and joy. Whole schools of thought to- 
day congratulate themselves that, leaving 
Christianity behind, they have pressed 
forward into a purer air, come nearer to 
the naked truth. 

Now those who rejoice in this way have 
never rested in bare negation, for here the 
soul simply cannot stay. Religion is ne- 
cessary to man; so much is witnessed by 
the whole story of human life, and never 
more strikingly than by the spiritual story 
of the nineteenth century. Those who 
have turned away satisfied from the reli- 
gion of Christ substitute for it always a 
religion of their own. This has been true 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 39 

from the time of Shelley to that of Emer- 
son, from the time of Emerson to that of 
Matthew Arnold. And so the movement 
of denial has cast, in its varying phases, 
successive shadows of assertion which form 
a strange, sad sequence of their own. 
Each phase of doubt has had its positive 
aspect, its effort to find in its very nega- 
tions solace and stimulus for the soul. To 
trace the development, phase by phase, of 
this positive movement within the limits 
of denial is perhaps an unattempted task ; 
yet few attempts could prove more fruitful. 
It is from the middle of the century 
that this tendency toward shadow-faiths 
becomes most clearly evident. The self- 
satisfaction of denial was from the first 
purely superficial ; nor could the negative 
hypothesis satisfy long. Gladly, for a 
moment, men turned from the dreams 
of spirit to the facts of sense. But for a 
moment only. The profound sadness of 
non-Christian thought was barely inter- 



40 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

rupted by the contempt of scientific denial. 
Not all the glory of scientific discovery, 
not the fascinating history of the Descent 
of Man, not the vision of the stars in their 
courses, arrested for more than a moment 
the keen search of the soul. Still it 
pierced by its longing beyond the glitter- 
ing procession of visible life ; still listened 
for some voice from the creative dark- 
ness whence the great procession starts. 
In the midst of that which they may in- 
vestigate men sought that which they 
may adore. 

It was then at this stage that first ap- 
peared the promise of the movement of 
reaction of which we are to trace the 
shadowy progress — the movement which, 
making no attempt to deny denial or to 
recall a banished faith, yet stretches lame 
hands through the darkness, and seeks, 
though it may not trust, a larger hope. 

We want to trace the thought-origin 
and life-origin of these faiths which spring 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 41 

from denial ; we want to question their 
value to our souls. Is the attempt auda- 
cious? Surely it is necessary too. For, 
though the inquiry be so wide that answer 
is hopeless, yet is it also so definite that 
answer is essential. Has a higher substi- 
tute been found for Christianity? Many 
have made up their minds yes or no; for 
those who are still groping these pages are 
written. Keenlv we need one another's 
comradeship in this sad yet tonic search ; 
and the simplest line of thought, if it has 
led even one soul into peace, is worth the 
pointing out. 

What attitude, what method, will best 
further our inquiry? Not, let us say at 
the outset, intolerance. Between pure, 
steady, literal agnosticism and Christianity 
there can be no moral quarrel, only a per- 
plexed silence. But between the expo- 
nents of Christianity and of new systems 
of religious thought there is often mutual 
and deep hostility. '' The only contempt- 



42 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

ible thing in the world/' it has well been 
said, ''is contempt." With this unlovely 
and intolerant quality our minds are too 
often tinged. Yet absolute tolerance is 
the only temper in which helpful thought 
about these matters is possible ; not the 
shallow tolerance of the newspaper or the 
man of the world, which springs from in- 
difference, but the passionate and noble 
tolerance of the seeker, which springs 
from the love of truth. If we trust God 
we must believe that He gives some of His 
truth to every seeking soul ; that the 
Light coming into the world lighteth 
every man ; and that the Spirit moves and 
guides in all differing attempts to solve 
life's mystery. We can no longer say 
with easy minds that Christianity is true 
and all other faiths are of the devil. 
Yet, on the other hand, to many of us 
Christianity is not merely one faith among 
many, a dying phase of religious evolu- 
tion. We cannot be quite sure that these 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 43 

new faiths, of ethical societies, theoso- 
phists, positivists, are rising from its ashes 
glorified. Somehow it is a little hard for 
us to believe that. Somehow we remem- 
ber times of bitter poverty and pain in 
our own lives, or yet more vividly, per- 
haps, in the lives of others, when the old 
words rose unbidden to our lips. Did 
we lie then? Did we feed souls on 
metaphors? Souls cannot live on meta- 
phors ; nothing can nourish them but 
facts. Christianity, unfortunately for the 
theorists, is not defunct. It shows among 
us an immense vitality. Its disciples, from 
a Salvation Army lass to Cardinal Newman, 
are perhaps the only thoroughly happy 
thinking people in the modern world. In 
any consideration of contemporary be- 
liefs, on the inspirations of modern lives, 
Christianity must be taken into account. 

The religion of the future! Where shall 
we find it ? Ah, let us look for that faith 
which answers most fully the needs of the 



44 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

human soul! Should it prove to be any 
modern substitute for Christianity we must 
accept it. Nay, if a new faith, however 
limited, holds any one new factor of spir- 
itual worth, we must let our Christianity 
go. For if any rehgion springing avow- 
edly from human thought alone can offer 
the soul something not held within the 
faith of old, then the religion of Christ 
must cede all claim to unique or supreme 
sacredness. It must take its place along 
with Buddhism, Mohammedanism, or the 
latest American system in religion — faiths 
all equally human because equally divine. 

Let us try to find the faith most compe- 
tent to set man free and make him noble 
— the faith of strongest appeal. 

''The faith of strongest appeal! But 
why seek it?" murmurs many a sighing 
voice among the shadows. ''To point it 
out is only to leave us sadder than before. 
Is desire the proof of fact? " 

Many a sincere and noble spirit rejects 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 45 

Christ because it so longs for Him, turns 
aside from faith because it is so an-hun- 
gered. y Christianity is so well adapted 
to the human mind," they cry, ''that the 
human mind is quite capable of inventing 
Christianity." Belief in the Word made 
flesh is created by the craving for a per- 
fect revelation ; belief in atonement springs 
from the human cry for redemption ; belief 
in immortaHty is the shadow, not of fact, 
but of desire. Browning, in '' A Death in 
the Desert," describes lovingly and sadly 
these people. He describes their condi- 
tion as 

" A lamp's death, when, suffused with oil, it chokes ; 
A stomach's, when, surcharged with food, it starves. " 

It is hard to know how to meet them ex- 
cept as Browning does. Yet, to the theist 
at least, an answer is ready. Does in- 
trinsic excellence argue truth? Is a faith, 
because beautiful, real? No, a hundred 
times no, if we have no hope and are 



46 THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 

without God in the world. But for one 
who trusts the Creator, yes, a thousand 
times yes. For if God is not mocked, 
neither does He mock His children. Can 
the wish of man conceive any good which 
the will of God has not made fact? Can 
man think a holy thought not thought by 
God before him? Nay, but "before they 
call, I will answer"; and we who believe 
in the Father may rest assured that the 
higher and more satisfying our concep- 
tions the more we may trust them and the 
nearer they approach to an adequate re- 
flection of eternal fact. 

Yes! If God is, and loves, the best 
must be true in Him, and the fairest faith 
which the soul can conceive is the most 
real. Let us look for this Best and Fair- 
est. Let us study the subtle spiritual re- 
lationships of those differing modern faiths 
which have sprung from the movement of 
denial, and consider them not so much 
metaphysically and absolutely as with con- 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 47 

stant reference to that human need and 
human nature out of which, after all, they 
spring. 

Even to the agnostic this line of inquiry 
must have a certain significance. He 
knows, indeed, no God of whose reason 
our reason is the image ; but he must 
accept in a measure, if he thinks at all, the 
validity of that thought-instrument which 
he uses. Perhaps he is also inclined to 
believe in the gradual development among 
men of the power clearly and justly to 
apprehend life ; and so he must feel a 
slight presumption — since negative cer- 
tainty is as impossible as positive — in favor 
of the truth which deliberate and symmet- 
rical judgment pronounces most desirable. 
The highest result of evolution may have 
a certain balance of favor on its side, and 
the creed which best sets character free for 
progress is at least worth respecting. 

Yet for agnostic, and, indeed, for theist 
as well, theoretical perfection is of course 



48 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

no final evidence of truth. The witness 
of fact must meet the cry of need. Chris- 
tianity can have no credence if simply a 
vision of what should be ; it must be a 
statement of what is. Our plea for fact, 
for historic evidence, is manifest to-day in 
the wide critical movement which is ex- 
amining Christian documents. This most 
wholesome and necessary movement our 
few slight pages cannot touch. But we 
must be conscious of our need before any 
evidence will convince us ; and to consider 
what answer is given by different new re- 
ligions to the cry of human need will pre- 
pare the way for inquiry into the external 
evidence of fact. To be sure, the advan- 
tage of much modern subjective religion 
is that it requires no external evidence at 
all ; and in this aspect our line of thought 
might have even more value than we claim 
for it. 

This is a Httle book of personal inquiry. 
It is not a theological treatise, and it does 



THE RENASCENCE OF FAITH. 49 

not pretend to any theological or philo- 
sophical knowledge. It will not deal with 
abstractions, but with life, common sense, 
the revelation of experience. If it clears 
from the way of one or two explorers in 
the tangle of life even one tiny thorn-bush, 
it will have done more than it ought, per- 
haps, to hope. 



III. 

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY, 



I will not prate of thus and so, 
And be profane with yes and no. 

Clough. 

Holy, holy, holy ! Lord God Almighty ! 

Though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see. 



III. 

THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 

The desire for God ! It can never die. 
The religious impulse! It is the supreme 
result of evolution. Thus it came to pass 
that in the very heart of scientific denial and 
the agnostic temper was soon generated a 
mystic somewhat calling itself religion. 

Science had seemingly finished her 
work, had substituted for the Father of 
Lights, to be loved, obeyed, adored, blind 
Force, insentient Law. In vain did sensi- 
tive souls lament the ancient faith, which 
had upheld and biessed, purified and 
healed. Given the physical, to find a 
substitute for the divine — such was the 
new task set the spirit. 

Darwin, the greatest mind in the scien- 
53 



54 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

tific movement, appears, strangely enough, 
to have had a nature closed to any ap- 
peal of the spirit. But the other leaders 
and representatives of the movement — men 
occupied less with the direct inquiries 
of modern science than with the bearing 
of these inquiries on life — were normally 
rehgious in instinct. They were restless 
without some working theory of man's 
relations with the universe as a basis for 
active life. It is Spencer who pursued the 
search with most energy — an energy 
springing, we are tempted to think, partly 
from the passion for system which pro- 
duced a whole library of classification and 
analysis. A religious element was cer- 
tainly latent in the evolutionary concep- 
tion which he himself defined for us. 
What, he asked, might it be? 

Science shows us a vast universe of 
ordered matter emerging from a myste- 
rious void. Where is there here scope for 
the religious passion? 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 55 

In the void itself, says Spencer. 
''Science," he writes, ''gives us an ex- 
planation which, carrying us back only a 
certain distance, there leaves us in the 
presence of the avowedly inexplicable. 
Higher faculty and deeper knowledge will 
raise rather than lower the element of 
wonder with which we view the course of 
Nature and the Unknown Abyss beyond." 

In the sense of wonder is the soul of 
religion. As the bright little sphere of 
our knowledge extends, it touches an ever 
greater surface of surrounding darkness ; 
and the need becomes greater and the 
scope wider for that reverent recognition 
of mystery which shall make men humble 
and sane. From the days w^hen the sav- 
age fearfully worshiped he knew not what, 
resident in the stone or tree, the appre- 
hension of an unknown Force has been the 
eternal element of truth in the vagaries of 
religion; it is the only element which can 
abide enlightened search. The effort to 



56 THE WITNESS OE DENIAL 

define that which is beyond our ken is the 
source of all fanaticism, and has led to 
all distortions of religion, from the barba- 
rous anthropomorphism of the savage to 
the anthropomorphism, more refined, but 
equally unthinkable, of Calvinist theology. 
There was excuse for a religion founded 
on sentiment and assumption in the old 
misty days, excuse even for the fantastic 
ideas of our fathers, only less crude than 
that worship of ancestral ghosts in which 
they remotely originated. To-day such 
excuse has fled. Science removes from us 
heaven and hell, God above and the Spirit 
of God within. But sternest loyalty to 
truth leaves us somewhat — the action of 
natural law, and, behind this law, Mystery 
solemn, insoluble, and mighty. When all 
illusions of fancy, all deceits of desire are 
suppressed we find ourselves— the words 
are Spencer's — '' in the presence of an In- 
finite and Eternal Energy from which all 
things proceed." Profound awe, intense 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 57 

humility in this dark presence, are hence- 
forth to form our religion, to nourish our 
spirits, and to replace the adoration 
charged with obedience and love with 
which, in less intelligent days, men pros- 
trated themselves before the Father of 
Lights. 

Instinctively, men began at once to call 
this kind of thought the Religion of the 
Unknowable. And by a right instinct. 
For not only unknown, but unknowable, 
at least to all criteria of science, the Energy 
behind phenomena and natural law must 
forever remain. Between this Energy and 
the spirit of man there is a great gulf fixed. 
That there is held within its darkness any- 
thing cognate to ourselves, anything to 
accept or summon love, we dare not 
assume. The highest spiritual state of the 
thorough agnostic is silent acquiescence in 
his own littleness ; sacrificing every intel- 
lectual instinct of assertion, every emo- 
tional instinct of love. 



58 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

*' I will not frame one thought of what 
Thou mayest either be or not," 

cries fervently the devout, doubting spirit. 
To how many among us this stern refrain- 
ing from question, this abstinence from 
speech or thought, seems the only reverent 
attitude! How often is the impulse to 
approach the Infinite Majesty with the 
happy trust of childhood checked by the 
modern spirit whispering the fear, not only 
of folly, but of irreverence ! The ardor of 
our worship is vitiated by the dread lest 
our deep feeling contain an unwarrantable 
assumption ; the eager freedom of our 
thought in the divine presence is ham- 
pered, if not inhibited, by the suspicion 
that all creeds are a human impertinence ; 
and the temper that abstains even from 
communion with God lest it should insult 
either His being or its own integrity is 
known to every modern soul. 

And if the inner life even of those nur- 
tured in the Church catholic and loyal to 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 59 

its traditions is invaded by this dread, 
what shall we say of those without? 
Vigorous has been the reaction of our 
generation against creeds. Men have 
schooled themselves to a severe reserve 
of thought which has threatened at times 
to sweep all theologies away. The old 
Hamlet-sigh, ''The rest is silence," is to 
many the only utterance, when, gazing 
past life's brief, sad, perplexing drama, 
they peer into the shadows beyond. The 
faith which has serenely claimed to pene- 
trate these infinite shadows seems to them 
puerile when not arrogant. If, in times of 
inward stress, they indulge themselves in 
vague emotions, in impulsive crying on 
Mystery to save, the folly of such moments 
finds full compensation and correction in 
the sharp self-contempt of more intellectual 
moods. Perhaps, if it be indeed true that 
the human soul is made for adoration, 
there may be more of the element of per- 
sonal worship than men recognize in the 



60 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

enthusiastic reverence with which they 
contemplate the Secret of Life and Force ; 
but such an element is unconscious. From 
the religion of the future, so runs a com- 
mon feeling, all attempt at formula, defini- 
tion, creed, must be abandoned, and awe 
must take the place of love. 

Does this awe of the Unknowable, this 
Religion of the Unknown, offer food before 
untasted to the soul of man? Is it new or 
strange ? Turn to the Book which defines 
the Infinite at times with most audacious 
assurance, which is repudiated with sharp- 
est decision by bare scientific thought. 
There are ancient words antedating by 
many a generation the discoveries of mod- 
eiTi agnostic science which seem to possess 
much the same ring. Less purely scientific 
because couched in the passion-fraught 
language of poetry, there yet rules behind 
the glow of their imagery a like reverent 
severity of thought. '' Canst thou by 
searching find out God? canst thou find 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 61 

out the Almighty to perfection? It is 
high as heaven ; what canst thou do ? 
deeper than hell; what canst thou know? " 
*' He made darkness His secret place." 
*' Clouds and darkness are round about 
Him." ''Thy way is in the sea, and Thy 
path in the great waters, and Thy footsteps 
are not known." ''Behold, I go for- 
ward, but He is not there ; and backward, 
but I cannot perceive Him : on the left 
hand, where He doth work, but I cannot 
behold Him : He hideth Himself on the 
right hand, that I cannot see Him." 

If such phrases abound in the Old Tes- 
tament, they are not lacking in the New. 
" No man hath seen God at any time," is 
the assertion of the most dogmatic of 
gospels. There is a book placed last in 
our Bibles, as the Apocalypse, the Reve- 
lation, par excellence, of the divine. At 
the very beginning is heard a Voice pro- 
claiming, " I am the Alpha and the 
Omega, which is and which was and 



62 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

which is to come, the Almighty." Did 
the modern scientist model upon these 
words his statement of '' an Infinite and 
Eternal Energy from which all things 
proceed " ? If so, he omitted nothing. 
In the presence of this Energy, science 
tells us that we abide. In the presence of 
the Alpha and the Omega, the Almighty, 
the seer of Patmos tells us that the living- 
creation abides and worships. And its 
chant rises forever, with no rest day and 
night, while in the liturgy joins the race of 
men, casting down their insignia of domin- 
ion : '' Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God, 
the Almighty, which was and which is 
and which is to come." Yet here must 
we pause ; for the creation, passing be- 
yond the self-announcement of the Eternal, 
hails it as Holy — a step far greater than 
any sanctioned by the modern scientific 
mind. 

The confession of the inscrutable mys- 
tery of the divine nature, the abnegation 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 63 

of all human sovereignty, the conscious- 
ness of the abyss between the Eternal and 
the creature of a day — these are the first 
conditions of the spirit of \vorship ; they 
are the primary postulates of all theism, 
and hence of all Christianity. 

Of all Christianity, not of all theology. 
Too often, throughout Christian history, 
theologians have neglected their solemn 
warning. Rehgious wars, in act and 
thought, have followed. Yielding to 
temptation, they have sought to define the 
Infinite, to put God in a formula. They 
have their reward. The formulae '' make 
themselves air." The Infinite can be ex- 
pressed under no human terms; and the 
next generation rejects, it may be with 
relief, it may be with strife and pain, the 
efforts of its predecessors. 



Our little systems have their day, 

They have their day and cease to be ; 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." 



64 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

A spiritual religion must ever find its 
very source and spring in the recognition of 
the solemn abyss of unknown being that 
surrounds our little life. The words 
" Eternal " and '' Infinite " imply by their 
very negations a Something incomprehen- 
sible to thought, alien to the nature of 
man, and because alien hailed as divine. 
No words of the scientist, no visions of 
far- darting speculation, can increase the 
humility with which the Christian recog- 
nizes his own ignorance, the reverence 
with which he prostrates himself before the 
majesty of infinite life and infinite law. 
Still he who seeks to behold the glory of 
God must be hidden in the cleft of the 
rock, and rejoice if a glimpse of a fleeting 
garment is vouchsafed him. The assump- 
tion of the agnostic is the essential condi- 
tion of the worship of the theist. Were it 
not so, humility would be lost in arrogance 
and faith in sight. 

Scientific thought has no new element 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 65 

of inspiration to offer human life. Nor, 
indeed, does it claim to have. Rather, it 
claims to reject the spurious and the tran- 
sitory and to retain that one permanent 
factor which can never be shaken by the 
progress of knowledge or the clash of the- 
ologies. Its glory is its simplicity. 

A simple faith ! It is always the cry of 
the denier. Protestant hurls it at Catho- 
lic ; theist at Protestant ; and the advocate 
of simple morality flings it at theist in due 
turn. One would think, to hear the com- 
mon phrase, that simplicity was the first 
requisite of religion, and that ^my creed 
which can be challenged must be false. 

Yet as matter of fact the simplicity won 
by intellectual negation has never held the 
world. Theorists and thinkers may feed 
themselves on abstractions ; men and 
women demand facts. And the more 
nearly the alleged facts — or truths — of 
faith meet the knowm and complex facts 
of experience the swifter is the response of 



66 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

the soul. Thus it is the faith that is 
famihar rather than the faith that is empty 
which appeals to humble folk and meets 
with ready understanding and swift assent. 
The peasant woman will grasp by intuition 
the full Catholic faith with all its intricacy 
and detail ; for she finds in her own nature 
that which leaps to meet every assertion 
and welcomes every claim. She rests be- 
wildered in the presence of theism, of a 
religion vague and broad. In truth, there 
are two kinds of simplicity : one at the 
beginning, one at the end ; that of struc- 
ture not begun, that of structure perfected. 
The amoeba is simple in the first sense, the 
human body in the second. '' From the 
homogeneous to the heterogeneous" the 
scientist tells us that evolution moves. Is 
its law to be disregarded in religion alone, 
and that faith to be highest and purest 
which is most amorphous? If so, the 
Religion of the Unknowable will satisfy our 
souls. 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 67 

But it does not satisfy them; it makes 
no general appeal. We have eloquent and 
noble words, ringing with a kind of triumph, 
inspired by the thought of the vastness of 
the world and our own ignorance ; we have 
more frequent expressions of passionate sor- 
row in the thought of a Father loved and 
lost. "Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man 
unveils me; I have none," cries Shelley 
exultant ; but Clough, in later days, mourns 
bitterly : '' Eat, drink, and die, for we are 
souls bereaved." And bereaved indeed the 
vague contemplation of Mystery leaves us. 

'' Mr. Spencer's Unknowable," writes a 
clever critic, '' may truthfully enough be 
expressed by the algebraic formula x^. 
The suffering world comes to the scientific 
philosopher waiting to be consoled, and he 
says, * Think on the Unknowable.' Where 
two or three are gathered together to wor- 
ship it, there may the algebraic formula 
suffice to give form to their emotions; 
they may be heard to profess their un- 



6S THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 

wearying belief in x"- even, if no weak 
brother of ritualistic tendencies be heard 
to cry, * O x^'y love us, help us, make us 
one with Thee.' '' 

The critic hints the truth. In the hour 
of pain, danger, death, can any one think 
on the Unknowable? Can Mystery re- 
deem? Shall we plunge our faith, our 
hope, our adoration into this blank 
nescience which envelops our pitiful 
humanity, and expect them to return 
aglow with hope, vital with courage? 
Such faith, if faith it can be called, meets 
one only of the requisites of the soul — the 
need to abase itself; the correlative need — 
to exalt itself, need so cogent if man is to 
act — it leaves untouched. It offers neither 
stimulus to effort, standard for conduct, 
nor strength in failure. Can a religion 
devoid of all these elements satisfy the 
race that is to be? The first word of the 
Almighty in the Apocalypse corresponds, 
indeed, exactly to the admission of 



THE RELIGION OF MYSTERY. 69 

science ; but the cry of worship even at 
first transcends it. The book unfolds its 
mystic sequence of the history of man as 
seen in the Spirit, and the great antiphon 
of worship sounds down the ages, reechoed 
at each crisis of the human tale. As taken 
up again and again, it throbs each time 
with new knowledge. *' Worthy art Thou,'* 
cry the elders, '' our Lord and our God, to 
receive the glory and the honor and the 
power: for Thou didst create all things, 
and becaiise of Thy will they were, and 
were created." Creative Force not only 
works, but wills. Later comes the chant 
of the great multitude — white-robed palm- 
bearers; and they, coming out of great 
tribulation, from all peoples and tribes and 
tongues, give praise to a God who saves. 
Finally comes a voice from heaven as of 
many waters, of thunder, of harpers play- 
ing on their harps ; but this '' new song " 
of those purchased out of the earth no 
man may understand, for it hath not 



70 THE IV I TN ESS OF DENIAL 

entered into the heart of man to conceive 
the revelations of the Infinite Force which 
await souls perfected. At the end the 
Almighty speaks once more, and He saith, 
'' Behold, I make all things new. I am 
the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning 
and the end. I will give unto him that is 
athirst of the fountain of the water of life 
freely. He that overcometh shall inherit 
these things ; and I will be his God, and 
he shall be My son." That which sufficed 
for creation shall suffice also for renewal, 
and the man who overcomes in the spirit- 
ual struggle of existence shall inherit the 
very nature of a Power no longer unknow- 
able or unknown. The first word of God 
in the Apocalypse is the true and scientific 
starting-point for faith ; must we hail the 
last as delusion? 



IV. 
THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY, 



For each man of all men is God, but God is the fruit of 

the whole ; 
Indivisible spirit and blood, indiscernible body and soul. 

O God with the world in wound, whose clay to his foot- 
sole clings, 

Glory to Man in the highest, for man is master of things. 

A. C. Swinburne. 

Raise Thou the arms of endless intercession, 
Jesus, divinest when Thou most art man. 

F. W. H. Myers. 



IV. 

THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 

Sharp and unsparing is the criticism on 
the Religion of the Unknowable quoted in 
the last chapter. The author might be a 
priest, nurtured on the most full and defi- 
nite ''forms" ever evolved as ''food of 
faith." He is, as it happens, Mr. Frederic 
Harrison, champion of the Religion of 
Humanity, chief exponent of Positivism in 
England. 

Harrison is as profoundly agnostic as 
Spencer. He too, also denying that a divine 
Spirit can ever be known by us, asserts 
that in ultimate analysis the life of sacrifice 
and aspiration cannot be ascertained to 
have other than a physical basis. He too 
rules out, not by argument, but by as- 
sumption, the soul, immortality, God. 

73 



74 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

Yet his repudiation of the scientific sub- 
stitute for rehgion is scathing and scornful 
— more scathing, more scornful, perhaps, 
than a follower of the Lord of Peace and 
Meekness would allow himself to express. 

For the Positivists, and with them many 
others, mark a phase in the reaction from 
Christianity precisely the reverse of that 
marked by Spencer. While one school of 
agnostic thought criticizes the definiteness 
of the Christian faith, another criticizes its 
mysticism. One school demands that 
rehgion exclude everything but the senti- 
ment of mystery ; another that it rule out 
mystery altogether, as the foe to light, and 
evolve its being from the contemplation of 
known fact. 

In the recognition of the dark grandeur 
of Force there is no response to the human 
cry, no appeal for action or service. Be- 
cause it leaves the soul still empty its 
votaries are very limited. The great cur- 
rent of agnostic consciousness has set in 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 75 

another direction, away from the myste- 
rious, the vast, and the vague, toward the 
clear, the famihar, and the human. Man- 
kind becomes the center of its thought, 
and practically, if not avowedly, the object 
of its religion. Positivism is one phase, 
and that the smallest, of the wide tendency 
to concentrate all passion and devotion on 
the service of men ; one phase of the Re- 
ligion of Humanity, which during the last 
half-century has expected, and at times 
almost appeared, to supplant the religion 
of Christ. But it is a phase curiously 
interesting because fully aware of its own 
nature, and trying to shape for itself an 
organic, semichurchly structure, while 
most agnostics are pure individualists, 
content to let attitude take the place of 
confession of faith. The Positivists, in- 
deed, do not like to be called agnostic. 
*^ The Positivist answer to the theological 
problem," says Harrison, ''is of course the 
same as the agnostic answer;" but negation 



76 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

is only the starting-point which shall lead 
to the '' Positive " faith. They have felt 
the need of the century, the aching hunger 
of the soul. They accept the dictum of 
science, unknown and known, no mediator 
between. But the solution of the scientist 
they discard. To fling their faith, their 
love, their service into a dark blank is not 
only cold, but unpractical. Another solu- 
tion remains, another possible answer to 
the hunger of the soul. God is lost to us, 
the Unknowable is useless. Let us take 
what remains — the Known. Starting on 
this basis, Auguste Comte built up an 
immense system which was to include all 
knowledge and conduct, and which found 
substance and center in the cry, *' Worship 
humanity; exalt the race-ideal." 

It was in the second quarter of the 
century that Comte published his Bible, 
the ''Philosophic Positive." He starts 
with assumption and classification. His- 
torical progress he divides into three 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 77 

stages : the theological, when man wor- 
shiped a supposed divine Being or beings 
and interpreted life in the light of such 
worship ; the metaphysical, when, convinced 
of the folly of belief in God, man still 
seeks to pierce the veil of phenomena, to 
apprehend causes, and to reach absolute 
truth ; finally, the positive, when, realizing 
the futility of the search for cause, man 
abandons speculation and confines himself 
within the limits of fact. Every science, 
says Comte, passes through these three 
phases. The science of religion, slowest 
because greatest of all, is only just emerg- 
ing from the second or metaphysical stage 
— nay, some shreds of the old theology 
yet cling about it in feeble minds. To 
shake these off, to escape also from thought 
of abstractions, to force man to a solid 
basis — here is the duty of the future, the 
inspiration of the enlightened mind. 

And let it not be supposed that the new 
religion was to be devoid of its ardent 



78 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

emotions, its ritual even. Comte devised 
for it a cult elaborate as that of the Roman 
Catholic Church, a cult of altars, Hghts, 
vestments, and sacred signs, with a calen- 
dar of saints. A central symbol, a woman 
of thirty with a child in her arms, was to 
replace the Madonna. Women, indeed, 
through whom runs the sacred river of hfe, 
were chiefly to be worshiped; for they 
stood as types of all humanity, that great- 
est of known facts. Positivism in England 
has known a very definite though limited 
development. Already there has been a 
split in the ranks ; the ritualistic brethren 
now worship in a church where an adap- 
tation of the Anglican liturgy is in use 
and prayers ascend to '' holy Humanity " ; 
while the more hard-headed members of 
the party — we might perhaps add, those 
endued with a sense of humor — continue 
to meet in a hall adorned with busts of 
great men, and to satisfy their devout im- 
pulses with lectures on popular history. 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 79 

But far more important than the exis- 
tence of Positivists as a sect is the large 
and indefinable extent to which their faith 
has spread as an attitude. It has taken 
possession of many of the most intelligent 
natures of the century. Its ardent plea 
for the service of our kind in the brief time 
that elapses before we go forth into the 
great darkness ; its faith in the influence 
which survives us as our only immortaHty ; 
its yearning love — love touched with pity 
— for its lame divinity, man — all these give 
to it a strange, sad beauty, like the last 
gleam of dying day in a wide twilight sky. 
John Stuart Mill was an admirer and fol- 
lower of Comte. G. H. Lewes and his 
great companion, George Eliot, were 
inspired and suffused by the highest Posi- 
tivist spirit To come to later times and a 
different type, it is hardly conceivable that 
the strong and terrible genius of Zola 
should have penned the pages of '' Docteur 
Pascal" without reference, definite even if 



80 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

unconscious, to the tenets of Comte. Yet 
it would be unfair to choose Zola as a 
typical exponent of Positivism. For one 
philosopher who would feel his awe in the 
presence of the Unknowable an adequate 
substitute for the sweet human faith 
of Christ, fifty men and women seize 
on a religion which at least enjoins on 
them, as the chief privilege of life, devo- 
tion to their fellow-beings. Those who 
have lost God will try forever to fill His 
place with man. So it comes to pass that 
the Religion of Humanity has become 
almost a cant phrase among us, and ex- 
presses itself in definite forms, shifting 
year by year. Societies of Ethical Cul- 
ture, repudiating, for reasons invisible to 
the outsider, connection with the Positiv- 
ists, yet hold tenets apparently similar, 
and seek by practical ritual in settlements 
and guilds among the poor to embody 
their tenets in ways in which the Christian 
church may well be glad to join. Mean- 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 81 

while countless wanderers in spirit, outside 
of societies or church, seek in cherishing 
faith in the future of the race the chief 
satisfaction to their souls. Humanitarian ! 
The ugly word has become in these latter 
days a battle-cry of progress and of hope. 
The advocates of this position, as they 
think of Christianity, are especially imbued 
with the sense that they have risen higher. 
And their great plea is that of an ethical 
superiority. They say much of the self- 
ishness of the Christian scheme, with its 
claim of personal immortality, its emphasis 
on individual salvation. '' We shall have 
a glorious religion," cried Shelley to Leigh 
Hunt long ago, in the shade of the cathe- 
dral of Pisa, *' when charity and not faith 
is made its basis." To nourish the soul 
on illusions — how weak! To concentrate 
thought upon itself — how dangerous! 
Far truer to abandon the desire to know ; 
far nobler, renouncing thought of the Be- 
yond, to center life and love on others! 



82 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

So shall unselfishness and honesty alike 
be better preserved, and ahruistic virtues 
replace the religion of egotism. 

It is hard to admit this charge of selfish- 
ness, brought against Christianity by those 
who would make the honor and care for 
men the center of life. The spiritual 
wisdom of the Church Catholic has taught, 
indeed, the supreme importance of per- 
sonal holiness. To this end she has en- 
joined keen self-searching; penitence, 
confession, reparation ; the yearning of 
the soul toward personal communion with 
the living God. But in any agnostic 
community these things or their equiva- 
lent must find place. Social morals must 
always be founded on individual virtue. 
To attain this virtue man must examine 
himself straitly, must know the agony of 
self-abasement, must recognize his failures, 
and must seek inspiration in the ardu- 
ous struggle through placing his own life 
beside the highest he knows. The drama 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. S3 

of the inner life must be eternal, whether 
that drama pass beneath a cloud earth-born 
or open to the spiritual heavens. 

Nor can the taint of selfishness be 
affixed to the Christian faith in immortal- 
ity. From the time of George Eliot, 
people who earnestly plead for a religion 
centered in influence on others have pre- 
ferred the charge. Fools and blind, not 
to see that this faith, as any other, becomes 
charged with selfish or unselfish passion 
according to the nature that holds it — can 
minister to an individuaHst craving or can 
satisfy the yearning cry for the good of 
the entire race. Unselfishness inheres in 
character, not creed. I, sound in mind 
and body, to w^hom nature, art, love, 
action, have opened their full glory ; I, the 
heir of the ages, living a life of peaceful 
energy, with spirit attuned to catch the 
faintest notes of the earth-music — what 
claim have I on immortality? I verily 
have lived ; when my time comes to pass 



84 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

into the shadow I may lay hfe aside, con- 
tent, or, if not content, at least knowing 
that the great universe has given me a fair 
share of its inheritance. But these my 
brothers, stunted of body, sordid of heart, 
lethargic of brain — these who live, uncon- 
sciously, in torment, pursued by the furies 
of physical want and of inherited vice — for 
these, what compensation ? How shall the 
great Law of the universe be justified for 
having made them? How, indeed, unless 
there is a new earth beyond these troubled 
shores for the meek to inherit ; unless, in a 
life to come, peace, light, purity, fullness 
of life such as they never knew below, 
await them? Not for ourselves, the rich 
in this world's goods of comfort, art, and 
thought ; not for ourselves, but for these, 
the oppressed of the earth, we demand 
from Justice immortality. 

Nor, as a matter of social morality, can 
we find anything new in the much-vaunted 
gospel of service. The modern Church, 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 85 

indeed, intent upon theologies sometimes 
fantastic, was from the first of the century 
false to the social passion. It is now at 
last responding, though as yet faintly, 
to the social renascence in which we 
live. But, in the teaching of her Master, 
the ethical and social commands of the 
Sermon on the Mount preceded by at least 
a year the mystic dogma of the first 
eucharist ; and it was only after long train- 
ing in the casting out of demons and in 
works of temporal mercy that the disciples 
were allowed to hear the mighty word, '' I 
and My Father are one." The law un- 
folded by Christ mounts upward, indeed, 
in crest after crest of moral and spiritual 
grandeur. He begins by repudiating the 
law of negative justice so sternly set forth 
in the Old Testament — '' An eye for an 
eye, a tooth for a tooth;" that law which 
is still the avowed — alas! too often the 
violated — canon of modern trade. He 
advances at once to the higher, positive 



86 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

laws of reciprocity and non-resistance : 
'' Whatsoever ye would that men should 
do unto you, even so do ye also unto them/* 
'' Love your enemies, and pray for them that 
persecute you." Still this law holds be- 
fore us a distant ideal, which we struggle 
to attain as individuals and ignore as a 
community. But the Master does not 
pause, or pauses only that a practical 
training may reveal the awful scope of His 
commands to His loving but foolish dis- 
ciples. Then, in the intimacy, familiar yet 
mystical, of His last hour on earth with 
those whom He has just for the first time 
called His friends. He lifts them at last to 
a yet nobler height, and describes to them 
the perfect social law, the law of sacrifice : 
*' This is My commandment, that ye love 
one another, even as I have loved you." 
*' Greater love hath no man than this, that a 
man lay down his life for his friends. Ye 
are my friends, if ye do the things which I 
command you." Then, going forth into the 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 87 

night, He manifests in act what He has 
taught in word, and the social gospel is re- 
vealed. However falteringly. His Church 
has followed Him. No height can be 
reached by the followers of a modern social 
morality which has not been trodden before 
by Christian feet. ^ 

Ethically we can find no point in which 
the Religion of Humanity transcends the 
religion of Christ. How is it spiritually? 

The worship of humanity ! Sad and 
puzzling the thought, as we contemplate 
it, becomes. Live for a while, as many of 
us have lived, in the slums of a mod- 
ern city, among the great majority; nay, 
walk for one long evening through the 
Bowery in New York — or, indeed. Fifth 
Avenue wdll do as well — and watch the 
faces streaming by : faces dull, sodden, 
unbeautiful, rarely criminal, but never 
ideal. Gather them into one composite 
vision ; is it this pitiful image that is 
offered for our god? 



88 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

Or suppose, without asking whether we 
have the logical right, we put aside the 
average. Concentrate thought upon the 
best and noblest of the race through its 
long history — the leaders of mankind, 
heroes, poets, statesmen, martyrs. Fuse 
their best into one image, still thinking of 
this image as the object of religion, and 
our first instinct, our surging emotion, is 
that of a great pity. Pity is noble and 
sweet; but it is a strange religion which is 
driven at the very heart of faith to replace 
worship by compassion. 

Where, indeed, is scope for adoration if, 
to satisfy the religious instinct, we turn to 
man alone? Religion demands an object 
of worship no less than a standard of con- 
duct and a comforter in pain. Can I pray 
to humanity ? Will its ears be open unto 
my supplications, accept my thanksgiving, 
purify my will? Will it discipline me to 
obedience ? Alas ! where may its com- 
mands be learned ? For many-tongued it 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 89 

is, and changing as the wind. Can it 
comfort me in the hour of anguish? 

" That loss is common would not make 
My own less bitter, rather more," 

is the cry of the high-minded soul. Can 
I serve humanity ? Yes ; this indeed, this 
alone ; but it is service rendered to a need 
below us, not to a glory enthroned above, 
and such service is not freedom. 

''Be it so," writes the humanitarian; 
'' but what more, or what better, have 
we? If this is not enough it is at least all 
that men and women on earth can possess." 
There is but one alternative — an Unknow- 
able Somewhat, which cannot be presented 
in terms of consciousness, to which the 
words ''emotion," "will," "intelligence," 
cannot be applied, yet which stands in 
place of the Creator; or a known human 
race, faulty if you will, stupid without 
doubt, but able at least to profit by your 
devotion. Choose ye which ye wall serve; 



90 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

for other God than these the eiiHghtened 
intellect of man, standing on the vantage- 
ground won by the wisdom of the ages, 
declares that there is none. 

The old assumption ! And yet the as- 
sertion of at-one-ment has been made, the 
revelation of the Divine has been given. 

We cannot even think the Unknowable, 
far less love it. And the object of religion 
— so proclaims the positive temper fostered 
by science itself — must be something that 
can be knovv^n and loved ; must, therefore, 
share our nature. We seek a God and 
we find him; our God must be Man. 

Yet the attempt is pitiful, to make a 
divinity out of men as we see them around 
us and in history — feeble, stupid, failing 
of perfection at their best. And the 
attempt is useless ; for men, taken collec- 
tively, can afford neither standard of con- 
duct nor strength in pain. 

But, looking back through history, we 
find one Figure on which the eyes of all 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 91 

the generations have been fixed. Alone 
among all the sons of earth it has borne 
their scrutiny and yet appears in purity 
unsullied, in wisdom supreme. A perfect 
standard of conduct was given to the 
world forever in the person of Jesus Christ. 
Verily the Son of man, He may be known 
by men ; and there is probably no fact in 
nature or history so -sharply distinct in the 
general consciousness to-day as that of 
His personahty. But in Him humanity 
loses its confusion, variableness, and fail- 
ings, and is uplifted into perfect unity, 
holiness, and strength. Gathering up into 
Himself the fullness of all men. He is the 
Race-ideal, the perfect archetype. Not, 
as the Catholic faith has always held, a 
man — one unit in the multitudinous 
throngs of human lives — but Man essen- 
tial, Man eternal. He appears as the Mas- 
ter of the race, the Vine of which all are 
branches, the Lord w^ho draws to Himself 
with irresistible power not only the wor- 



92 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

shipful service, but the very being of men. 
Those who know Him give their allegiance 
to no mere stream of life, passing through 
countless forms, but to one ever-living 
Lord. 

And in the Church, the mystical body of 
Christ, we have a yet further extension of 
the idea for which the lover of humanity 
cries. For the Church, both normally and 
ideally, includes the entire human race ; 
even now, in a world invaded by sin and 
failure, it is the representative of all, the 
earnest of the society to be. It not only 
claims our service, but commands our 
reverence ; for, made up as it is of faulty 
and distorted people, it yet reaches up into 
a higher region, and witnesses to perfec- 
tion, through its organic and sacramental 
union with a Head in whom are centered 
holiness, wisdom, authority. The intense 
and ardent devotion to '' holy Humanity " 
sounds strained and unreal from the lips 
of the Positivist; it has real meaning, a 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY, 93 

meaning which yet contradicts in no wise 
superficial and obvious facts, on the Hps of 
the Christian. Christ in history and in 
His Church may well be the center of the 
souls of men. Thus does the Christian 
faith free from impurity and fulfil in glory 
the demand for an object of worship which 
can be known, loved, and served. 

The cravings of the Religion of Human- 
ity are met in the religion of Christ; how 
about the limitations ? Does Christianity 
join in the hatred of mystery, in the re- 
fusal to let thought or imagination dwell 
on the Infinite Unknown? 

Not so. For in Him who is the first- 
born of every creature, we behold the 
image of the invisible God. Man must 
worship mystery, exclaims the scientist. 
Man must worship man, is the rejoinder of 
practical thought. And the two state- 
ments find union and great harmony in a 
few quiet words written many a century 
ago, which tell us, *' No man hath seen 



94 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

God at any time ; the only begotten Son, 
which is in the bosom of the Father, He 
hath declared Him." 

The mystery of Infinite Power is not, in 
the Christian faith, denied, but revealed, 
and revealed that men may adore. *' The 
fear of the Lord" is the first element of 
worship ; but this fear is made luminous 
with love. The Eternal Force behind 
phenomena Spencer refuses to call per- 
sonal. ''And I do so," he says, "because 
it is not less than personal, but more." 
With every word the Christian agrees. 
God must be more than personal : does 
He not comprehend the universe? Per- 
sonality, whatever the word may mean — 
consciousness, love, will — must be included 
within His being: do they not flow forth 
from Him into the nature of man? 
Whence should man derive consciousness, 
if consciousness there be none in the 
Creative Force which is the source of his 
being? But this Power, not less than 
personal, but more — how much more may 



THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY. 95 

be known to the denizens of other worlds 
than ours — is revealed to us, in the aspect 
it bears to humanity, in Him who emptied 
Himself of His glory, and took upon Him 
the form of a servant, and was made in 
the likeness of man. Thus revealed, the 
Eternal is manifest to us, not as force, not 
as law, but as the Father. Thus are 
human and divine made at one ; thus is 
the Infinite revealed to the finite ; thus is 
crossed that vast and sundering gulf which 
seems to the man of pure science, over- 
whelmed by the sense of distance, impass- 
able not only to the reason, but to the 
imagination of man. In the first fourteen 
verses of the Gospel according to St. John 
we have the full account of a spiritual 
evolution, of the creation of the universe, 
through a divine Reason shining unrecog- 
nized at first in the darkness of inorganic 
being, yet illumining all ; gradually recog- 
nized as human consciousness appears ; 
manifesting itself at last under a form 
knowable to men ; and exalting those who 



96 THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 

respond with power to become full par- 
takers of infinite and eternal life. '* In 
the beginning was the Word, and the 
Word was with God, and the Word was 
God. . . . All things were made by Him. 
. . . And the light shineth in the darkness ; 
and the darkness apprehended it not. . . . 
There was the true Light, which lighteth 
every man, coming into the world. . . . 
As many as received Him, to them gave 
He the right to become children of God, 
even to them that believe on His name. 
. . . And the Word became flesh, and 
dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, 
glory as of the only begotten from the 
Father), full of grace and truth." Here 
is the satisfaction of all thought ; here the 
demands of the Religion of Mystery and 
the Religion of Morality are met and 
fused. Here, rejecting their negations, 
the positive assertions of each are seen to 
be essential and rightful elements of the 
faith that is eternal. 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY, 



The one Spirit's plastic stress 
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there 
All new successions to the forms they wear 
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight 
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 
And bursting in its beauty and its might 
From trees and beasts and men into the heavens' light. 

Shelley, Adonais, 

Come, thou Holy Spirit, come, 
And from thy celestial home 

Shed a ray of light divine. 
Come, thou Father of the poor. 
Come, thou Source of all our store, 

Come, within our bosoms shine- 

Ancient Hymn, 



V. 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 

Mystery and man. Here, then, are 
the substitutes which we have so far found 
offered for the old faith in the Son, full of 
grace and truth, leading us to the Father of 
our spirits. There is yet one more faith i.i 
which lost minds, lost hearts, have sought 
to take refuge from the cold of a godless 
world. '' There is no God ; let us worship 
a m3^stery," says Spencer. ''There is no 
God ; let us worship humanity,'' says the 
Positivist. ''There is no God; let us wor- 
ship a tendency," says the man of culture. 

The phases of agnostic thought which 
we have been considering can never satisfy. 
They are too severe. In politics, art, 

99 



100 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

religion, there are always a few rigorous 
souls who know^ where they belong and 
where they do not ; black to them excludes 
white, white has nothing in common with 
black. But the majority are neither rig- 
orous nor, perhaps, logical. The sensitive 
people, too intensely alive ; the sluggish 
people, only half alive ; the critical people, 
whose life is absorbed in the instinct to 
observe — all these hate to take sides. 
Their effort is to palHate and retain ; their 
impulse, compromise. 

So it happens that few people, perhaps, 
repudiate Christianity thoroughly. The 
exultant antagonism of Huxley or Inger- 
soU is very rare ; the sweeping and con- 
temptuous denial of the older scientific 
agnosticism or of the followers of Comte 
is becoming constantly rarer. Christianity 
is less often than ten years ago, even, 
treated as an exhausted force. Its litera- 
ture, its ethics, its ideals, indeed, Uke 
gentle and pure rills of mountain water, 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 101 

the waters of regeneration, have worn for 
themselves in the rocky nature of man 
channels which cannot readily be aban- 
doned or forgotten, though in drought the 
streams are dry. We live in a society 
which, though hardly Christianized in fact, 
is deeply Christianized in theory. Our 
art, speculation, conduct, are shaped by 
influences wholly absent from that pagan 
civilization which was in some respects so 
much fairer than our own. Our convic- 
tions may change and become de- Chris- 
tianized ; but the intangible yet controlling 
sentiments which these convictions have 
brought with them, and which determine 
the quality of life as undertones determine 
the quality of a musical instrument — these 
cannot perish at once. 

Thus hosts of people hold to the past 
with tenderness, even when they cannot 
hold to it with faith. They feel the lofti- 
ness of Christian passion, the worth and 
power of Christian organization. Why 



102 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

relinq^uish all this? Why renounce forms 
hallowed by the prayers of generations, 
entwined with the fibers of our deepest 
inherited life? Why not cling to the old 
even while we spring to the new ? 

The exponents of such an attitude are 
all around us. They use our terms, 
sympathize with our ideals, join sometimes 
in our worship, claim membership in our 
churches. We cannot live earnestly or 
broadly without meeting them at every 
turn. The children of the scientific move- 
ment, they have reacted from it with their 
hearts, but not with their minds. The 
exhilaration of denial has died away, and 
their impulse is constructive. Far from 
challenging the faith of their fathers, they 
claim that in essentials it is still their own. 
The sacredness of the past is potent with 
them, and organic connection with the 
Christian Church, no less than the atmo- 
sphere of Christian sentiment, is their most 
cherished heritage. 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 103 

The revolutionary passion of revolt 
emanated chiefly from France ; the modern 
theories of science were identified with an 
English school of thought. But this latest 
and most subtly vital of all phases of 
agnostic thought derives tone and char- 
acter, in a double sense, from Germany. 
The way was prepared for it by the 
Hegelian philosophy, with its constant 
tendency to place the idea above the fact ; 
and this impulse of pure transcendentalism 
was reinforced bv the resultant school of 
theological criticism, with its fierce yet 
confident challenge of the authenticity of 
the Christian documents. The awakening 
of the historic sense, indeed, potent in 
secular tracts, could not be expected to 
spare Christianity ; the spirit which re- 
spects and cherishes the past must of 
necessity analyze it also. Dread of the 
result of destructive analysis was removed 
from men thoroughly trained by idealist 
philosophy to believe 



104 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

*' It matters nothing for the name, 
So the idea be left the same." 

And the result was the appearance of crit- 
ics Hke Keim or Hohzmann, who do their 
best to demoHsh the historical basis of 
Christianity, while professing and experi- 
encing most exalted reverence for the 
Christian faith. 

Browning, the poet so keenly alive to 
all contemporary thought-movements, has 
given us in his '' Christmas Eve " the most 
concise study and summary of a thinker 
of this type. The soul, which is to learn 
that love is supreme whether manifest 
through vulgarity, formalism, or critical 
scholarship, is transported from the hideous 
dissenting chapel to the glory of the mid- 
night mass at St. Peter's, and thence to 
the lecture-desk at Gottingen, where the 
''sallow, virgin-minded, studious" pro- 
fessor is demoHshing the myth of Christ — 

" Whether 'twere best to opine Christ was, 
Or never was at all, or whether 
He was, and was not, both together." 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY, 105 

The professor's discourse must be read to 
be appreciated. Denying facts and words 
of the gospel record, he yet, when the 
destructive work is at an end, bids his 
hearers give to the story of Christ their 
supreme reverence — 

" Which, though it meant 
Something entirely different 
From all that those who only heard it, 
In their simplicity, thought and averred it, 
Had yet a meaning quite as respectable." 

Then breaks forth in a rush the poet's 
half-indignant, half-impatient, amused 
flood of comment : 

'* Truth's atmosphere may grow mephitic 
When papist struggles with dissenter. . . . 
But the critic leaves no air to poison ; 
Pumps out, with ruthless ingenuity, 
Atom by atom, and leaves you — vacuity. 
Thus much of Christ does he reject ? 
And what retain ? His intellect ? 
What is it I must reverence duly ? 
Poor intellect for worship, truly. 
Which tells me simply what was told 
(If mere morality, bereft 
Of the God in Christ, be all that's left) 
Elsewhere by voices manifold, 
With this advantage, that the stater 



106 THE M/ITNESS OF DENIAL 

Made nowise the important stumble 

Of adding, He the sage and humble 

Was also one with the Creator. 

You urge Christ's followers' simplicity, 

But how does blame evade it ? 

Have Wisdom's words no more felicity ? 

« • > > • 

Morality to the uttermost, 

Supreme in Christ, as we all confess. 

Why need we prove, would avail no jot 

To make Him God, if God He were not ? 

What is the point where Himself lays stress ? 

Does the precept run, ^ Believe in good, 

In justice, truth, now understood 

For the first time ' ? — or, ' Believe in Me, 

Who lived and died, yet essentially 

Am Lord of Life' ?" 

Finally, Browning sums up the critic's 
position and his own comment: 

*' * Go home, and venerate the myth 
I thus have experimented with — ■ 
This man, continue to adore Him 
Rather than all who went before Him 
And all who ever followed after.' 
Surely for this I may praise you, my brother. 
Will you take the praise in tears or laughter ? 

Nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases you, 
* Christian ' — abhor the Deist's pravity. 
Go on, you shall no more move my gravity 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 107 

Than, when I see boys ride a-cockhorse, 

I find it in my heart to embarrass them 

By hinting that their stick's a mock horse, 

And they really carry what they say carries them. " 

From Germany to England the thought- 
journey is long. Before i860 a reaction 
had set in on the Continent toward ad- 
mitting more and more of an historic basis 
to the gospel story, and a nearer approach 
of the narrative to the events described. 
Strauss, in his second '' Life of Jesus," 
abandons the purely mythical theory of the 
first '' Life " in favor of an historic though 
shadowy figure. Thus in the land of their 
origin the mythical and idealist theories 
soon underwent modification; but in 1880 
the theory-wave, in its first fullness, was 
still affecting England. It was in vain, for 
many, that churchmen and theologians 
tried to stay its force. The criticism of 
the Christian documents suggested a host 
of new doubts and questions, which coin- 
cided only too readily with the a priori 
difficulties in the way of faith presented 



108 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

by scientific speculation. A transcendental 
philosophy, hinting that the spiritual truths 
of Christianity were independent of historic 
fact, finished the work ; and the agnostic 
position in its latest phase was thoroughly 
matured. It has reached classes whom 
the previous course of the movement of 
denial had never wholly won — people with 
a literary sense, which the scientists have 
not; people with a sense of humor, which 
the Positivists have not; and the many 
fine, rare, delicate spirits who are exclu- 
sively transcendentalist and indifferent to 
crude questions of fact. 

The final agnostic attitude, thus wide in 
its appeal, has permeated thought rather 
than defined itself into a school. The man 
who did most to spread it, and who was 
himself its most finished exponent, was 
doubtless Matthew Arnold. Arnold, in- 
deed, more French than German in tem- 
perament, mocks German critics as sharply 
as Anglican bishops. A free-lance, he 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 109 

fights under no banner; yet it is obvious 
enough, to any one who reads his books 
as a whole, how largely he was formed by 
the thought he despises. 

One of the most significant, though not 
one of the greatest figures of the century, 
Arnold tempts us to linger. A man of 
exquisite culture, nurtured in strictest 
Christian tradition, he clung devotedly to 
Christian sentiment ; yet Christianity, on 
its supernatural side, had become to him 
an irrevocable dream. It is quite wrong 
to speak as if Arnold had been an antag- 
onist to Christianity, an iconoclast thirsting 
for destruction. Nothing is clearer than 
that his conscious aim was constructive. 
He believed that Christianity contained 
elements inestimably precious ; that the 
age-thought, crudely Philistine, was in 
danger of letting these elements go and 
impoverishing life forever. He sought to 
distinguish the transitory from the endur- 
ing, and to lead men to the recognition of 



110 THE fVITNESS OF DENIAL 

that in the teachings of Christ which could 
never die. He himself tells us that while 
in England his books were viewed as a 
dangerous onslaught on Christianity, critics 
on the Continent marveled that a man of 
intelligence should waste his time in the 
fatuous and strange effort to discover 
elements of permanence in an outworn 
faith. Deep love and tender reverence are 
visible in all Arnold's treatment of the 
New Testament, love and reverence all the 
more striking when compared with the 
flippancy of his favorite tone toward the- 
ology and church dignitaries. This exalted 
religious sentiment makes distinctions dif- 
ficult, and, in a very bewildering world, 
bewilders us yet more. To a man of his 
type, remarkable less for logical acumen 
than for keen literary sensitiveness, the 
value of Church and Bible is twofold — their 
ministry .to emotion and their guidance to 
a moral life. These elements he endeavors 
to preserve intact, untwining from them, 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. Ill 

gently or rudely as the case may be, the 
intellectual conceptions and definite doc- 
trines which were once supposed to bear 
to emotion and maxim the relation of a 
flower to its perfume. Arnold would keep 
the aroma; but he ruthlessly flings the 
flower away. Rejecting scornfully, from 
the idea of God, the personal and all 
which pure reason cannot recognize, he 
keeps a tendency that makes for righteous- 
ness. He considers the person of Christ, 
and, passing as unworthy of notice the 
Cathohc faith of the Godhead manifest in 
perfect manhood, he presents to us the 
Jewish mystic, wise with the wisdom of 
the heart, instinct with a swxet reasonable- 
ness. Of the glorious scope of the New 
Testament commands and promises to the 
believing soul, he leaves us the method of 
inwardness, the secret of self-renunciation. 
And having thus '' defecated," as has well 
been said, '' the conception of religion to a 
mere transparency," he bids us retain in 



112 THE IVJTNESS OF DENIAL 

fullness our old passion of worship ; direct- 
ing it no longer to the God adored by our 
fathers, but to a tendency toward right- 
eousness. '' Morality touched by emotion" 
becomes our religion, and a '' Something 
not ourselves " becomes our God. 

On the whole, Arnold defines clearly 
enough the amount of intellectual convic- 
tion which underlies much Christian phra- 
seology. An uneasy tendency is abroad 
to demateriaHze religion, as it were, to 
escape from the troublesome connection 
with historical and concrete fact ; to relin- 
quish ever3^thing susceptible of challenge, 
and to take refuge in abstractions. The 
very strength of the religious emotion, in 
a way, aids this tendency. Spiritual pas- 
sion is eternal in the soul ; but the force 
of feeling may at times be self-sufficing 
and veil by its very intensity the absence 
of definite object. Such an attitude is, as 
a rule, happy. No longer pursued by the 
sense of loss or haunted by regrets, it is 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 113 

complacent and peaceful. It offers a 
compromise which retains the comfort of 
use and wont while escaping strenuous 
demands on thought. Many people, more 
marked by devoutness and sympathy than 
by clearness of thought, and impressed by 
the wideness of truth, fail to see the dis- 
tinction between this attitude and the 
attitude of the Church. 

Yet the distinction is absolute. The 
Church is the guardian of what her foes 
call dogma and she calls truth ; that is, 
of belief in central definite and objective 
facts. Only secondarily and as result is 
she the guardian of morals or the inspirer 
of feeling. Those who deny a God with 
whom intercourse is possible as with a 
friend, an immortality in which man may 
find release, those who restrict our in- 
spiration to powers and laws evolved in 
human experience, these are as truly 
agnostic as the most virulent foe of Christ 
and the Church. Whatever delicate sym- 



114 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

pathy they may have for the exquisite 
ethics of Christianity, liowever they may 
cherish and adopt Christian sentiments and 
terms, they differ from other schools of 
agnostic thought only in surrounding their 
negations with the glamour of finer feeling 
and a more subtle sense of duty. 

This attitude is a witness to the mis^ht 
of Christianitv ; but it is a sorrowful wit- 
ness. One can hardly refrain from enter- 
ing a protest against, not its spirit, but its 
method. The protest would be launched, 
not in the name of Christian dogma nor 
of moral consistency, but of intellectual 
honesty. For surely such an attitude 
tends toward w^hat George Eliot, in '' Theo- 
phrastus Such," calls '' debasing the cur- 
rency." Arnold rebukes over-scrupulous- 
ness ; but in truth it is well-nigh impossi- 
ble to become over-scrupulous in our me- 
dium of intellectual exchange. It is hard 
enough to understand one another in this 
bewildering and sorrowful world. We live 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY, 115 

amidst the confusion of tongues, and no 
man can be sure that he speaks the same 
language as his fellows. That we behold 
the same objects in the physical world is 
matter of pure conjecture ; that we hold 
the same conviction in the inner world of 
mind is an hypothesis doubly removed 
from demonstration. Is it not, then, un- 
wise to destroy the little unity that we 
have in our means of interchange ; to take 
words which have already gained a vital 
and definite meaning through long use and 
wont, so that everybody approximately 
understands them, and to insist on using 
them in a cjuite new sense, retaining what 
they adumbrate, but rejecting what they 
signify? Yet surely this is w^hat is done 
by people who speak of the living Christ 
as a name for the race-ideal, of the res- 
urrection as signifying simply moral or 
spiritual regeneration, of God as a tendency 
that makes for righteousness. To mean 
an abstraction when one says ''God" is 



116 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

neither fair nor honest. Words are flesh 
as well as spirit. Try to strip away the 
flesh — historical implication, intellectual 
conviction — and the spirit, the emotional 
and moral power, becomes not only invis- 
ible, but unknowable. Let us at least 
keep the rough accuracy that comes from 
meaning by words what our fathers meant, 
what simple people mean, what the w^ords 
themselves, taken at their face-value, seem 
to say. If we are to have a new religion, 
let us have a language for a new religion. 
If our religion consists of the moral senti- 
ment of the old, minus its convictions, let 
us not use language which was assuredly 
meant to imply the fact first and the feeling 
only by inference. Let us avoid using as 
poetry — Arnold's pet illustration — what 
was meant as science. Stern scrupulous- 
ness in speech is our only hope of under- 
standing one another at all or making real 
progress. If our faith is true and high it 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 117 

ought to be quite capable of engendering 
a new poetry of its own. To borrow is 
evidence of weakness. 

Yet an attitude in which rare spirits find 
repose cannot be founded on illusion. 
What is it, then, in this religion of abstrac- 
tions which supports the soul? 

It is the recognition of that tendency to 
righteousness which operates, mighty but 
unseen, through all the course of human his- 
tory, bending men's hearts to itself to fulfil 
the counsels of the Eternal. This school 
of thought cares not, with the scientist, to 
fix its eyes on the abyss, the wide space- 
gulf behind visible nature. Nor does it, 
with the pure lover of humanity, Positivistor 
other, seek to center the religious passion on 
a personal, concrete race of men. Person- 
ality it abhors, indeed, as if the very term 
savored of limitation. It is an impulse of 
high culture, at times, to withdraw from fel- 
lowship with men into a solitude of thought. 



118 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

*' The lofty peaks but to the stars are known, 
But to the stars and the cold lunar beams ; 
Alone the sun arises, and alone 

Spring the great streams." 

The impulse which prevails toward men 
seems also to prevail in the thought of the 
Eternal ; and men repudiate the personal 
with horror from their faith, as they escape 
it in their lives. But that which meditative 
thought finds most worthy of honor, that 
which stirs it to action and feeling, is the 
recognition of moral force. We perceive 
such force playing through human history ; 
through all man's errors making for truth, 
through all sin for righteousness, through 
all vacillation sweeping steadily forward 
with irresistible might. In the individual 
it is the impulse which makes for inward 
purity and self- renouncement ; in the 
community, for social righteousness ; in 
the long sequence of human generations 
it manifests the wide and just workings 
of the moral law. It is this force, as re- 
vealed to the student of human experience, 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 119 

which is to exact obedience and inspire 
strength. 

Is there here any element of inspiration 
absent in Christianity ? Is this recognition 
of a spiritual force molding destinies and 
encircling life, working outward from and 
through the conscience of men, a new 
revelation ? 

We saw how the religious instinct of the 
man of pure science, his mind concentrated 
on the natural order, led him to bow before 
the mystery surrounding nature, which he 
worshiped as the source of life; and we 
found this Infinite and Eternal Energy 
recognized with awful dread by the pro- 
phets of old as the God who hideth Him- 
self, by the Christian seer as the Almighty, 
the Beginning and the End. Then, noting 
how the humanitarian finds an opposite 
religion in the service of his kind and the 
worship of the^ race-ideal, we saw that the 
satisfaction of tlie craving which led him 
back to man was found in the adoring ser- 



120 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

vice of that Son of God who, incarnate in 
humanity, exalts the entire race to mystic 
union with Himself. We are confronting" 
now a third phase of agnostic thought — a 
phase which loves to dwell, not on nature 
nor on men, but on the moral law. It 
recognizes, as the stimulus to devotion and 
ardor, an influence viewless as wind, un- 
confinable as water, kindling like flame, 
moving toward righteousness in society 
and in the soul. 

What have we here but reverent recog- 
nition of the final doctrine of the Christian 
faith? '' Let Thy loving Spirit," cried the 
psalmist long ago, '' lead me forth into 
the land of righteousness." All through 
the Old Testament breathes the sense of 
a spiritual force, making for holiness. It 
moves at first upon the face of the waters. 
It is known supremely in the lives of men. 
They cannot escape it. Whither shall 
they flee, then, from its presence ? Shaped 
and guided by its direction only could 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 121 

they reach goodness. '' Take not Thy 
Holy Spirit from me." It Hfts them out 
of bondage into freedom. In its hberty 
alone could life be secure : '' Stablish me 
with Thy free Spirit." Time goes on, and 
with clearer light the consciousness of 
this force becomes more distinct. It is 
hidden, universal, invisible, the very at- 
mosphere of human life, yet manifest at 
times only. '' The wind bloweth where it 
listeth, but thou canst not tell whence it 
cometh, and whither it goeth." Those 
*'born anew" in its might share its mys- 
terious power, free of the world, uplifted 
into a higher region ; for *' where the Spirit 
of the Lord is, there," as the psalmist 
knew, ''is liberty." It is essentially, with 
all its mystery, moral ; its results are love, 
joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, good- 
ness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance — 
an ideal of character suave yet austere, in 
which the gentle and bright joyousness 
of the Greek meets the high standard of 



122 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

the Hebrew. Thus it works secretly in 
the conscience of each man, to purify, in- 
struct, and guide ; but, greater than the 
being of any one, it works in the collec- 
tive soul, and is the universal power bind- 
ing the human race in one, through all 
illusions of sin and failure making for an 
ideal not yet attained — '' for through the 
Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of 
righteousness." Impersonal, it speaks not 
of itself, and may be known only in its 
workings ; it shows unto us the things of 
Another, revealing the perfect Standard of 
conduct for which men cry aloud. This 
is the force, evident to any thoughtful 
eye, which perpetually convicts the world 
in respect of sin, of righteousness, and 
of judgment. The Spirit of righteous- 
ness, it is also the Spirit of truth, the power 
which, bringing all things to remembrance, 
interprets the past and enables men to read 
the lessons of history. Revealing the past, 
it makes for the future, showing things to 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 123 

come and guiding into all truth. It is, as 
it has been from the beginning and shall 
be for all time, the informing life of all 
spiritual and social evolution. 

Here is the Catholic doctrine, in the 
very words of the ancient and dogmatic 
Book which the Church hold sacred. Where 
does it fail to cover the faith of the tran- 
scendentalist : the perception of a Power 
which may not be defined, making for 
righteousness ; of spiritual force, mighty in 
nature, in history, and in the souls of men ? 

All through the century has been in- 
creasing the number of those who fear — 
with too much reason from the past history 
of religious thought — a crude anthropo- 
morphism ; who, dowered with deep spirit- 
ual intuition, shrink from limiting their 
perception of divine power within the 
thought of personality. This rehgious 
movement of revulsion has, however, 
known a distinct development. In its 
earlier phases (before, we may say, 1850), 



124 THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 

those who revolted from the Church and 
flung aside the conception of a theological 
Deity found their chief inspiration and 
awe in contemplating divine life pervading 
nature. Philosophers and poets — Spinoza, 
Shelley, Emerson, to a great degree Car- 
lyle — nourished their spiritual natures, 
widened their imaginative outlook, and 
prepared in advance the corrective for a 
purely materialistic conception of evolution, 
by their intuition of the one Spirit's plastic 
stress, sweeping through the dense physical 
world, imposing forms on all creation, and 
bursting, in sequence of cumulative glory^ 
'' through trees and beasts and men, into 
the heaven's light." This enraptured 
pantheism — emotion which mistook itself 
for philosophy — held an element of true 
inspiration which cannot die ; but as time 
advanced another phase of thought be- 
came more appealing. Consciousness more 
and more passed from nature to center 
itself in man. Those who were not drawn 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY. 125 

into the Christian reaction continue to 
deny or ignore personaHty in spiritual 
force ; but they have turned to tracing 
the movement of that force in the moral 
rather than the natural world, in human 
history and experience rather than in the 
goings forth of the morning and the even- 
ing. We may correlate the pantheism of 
Emerson or Spinoza with the sense for the 
mystery of nature developed by the scien- 
tist ; while the tendency-worship of Arnold 
has more in common with the love and 
reverence for men shown by the religion 
of humanity. 

But, whether in earlier or later form, the 
recognition of spiritual force has for the 
Christian no new element. It is simply 
the intuition, vouchsafed to all who ear- 
nestly seek the hght of nature, history, or 
the soul within, of the Holy Spirit of God. 
This Spirit, moving upon the waters at the 
creation, is immanent in the whole uni- 
verse, a principle of beauty and of life 



126 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

compelling matter to yield up divine 
secrets ; but it abides most truly and most 
wondrously in the soul born anew to child- 
like faith ; and, moving toward righteous- 
ness in the Church which has received its 
influence, slowly, surely, according to the 
working of mighty laws, evolves the society 
to be. 

We may trace a wide distinction, how- 
ever, between the pantheistic thought of 
the first and second half of the century ; 
that which springs from the contemplation 
of nature is far less profoundly agnostic 
than that which springs from the con- 
templation of man. For to Shelley or 
to Emerson the spiritual force discerned 
within the workings of nature is generated 
apart from nature, and transcends the visi- 
ble, material world. But to Arnold or the 
pure ethicist the mystic force which sways 
human destiny, the '' tendenc}^," the 
'' Eternal," has no source outside the being 
of man. We may call it '' not ourselves," 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY, 127 

but practically it has no existence for 
thought, apart from human consciousness. 
We say it '' makes for righteousness " ; but 
that very righteousness can be known to 
us from arbitrary inference alone. To the 
man for whom religion is morality touched 
with emotion God is simply the atmosphere 
of the human moral instinct, swayed by 
some great impulse till it becomes a wind, 
powerful to drive the wills of men forward 
on its current. Spiritual force is essen- 
tially self-created. It beareth witness of 
itself. ''Such witness," said, long ago, 
One whose spiritual wisdom all thought 
delights supremely to honor — '' such wit- 
ness is not true." 

Far different is the language familiar 
to Christian ears: ''And I will pray the 
Father," says our Lord to the disciples, 
touched with wondering fear, " and He 
shall give you another Paraclete, that He 
may abide with you forever; even the 
Spirit of truth ; . . . He abideth w^ith you, 



128 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

and shall be in you. . . . He shall guide you 
into all the truth: for He shall not speak 
from Himself; but what things soever He 
shall hear, these shall He speak : and He 
shall declare unto you the things that are to 
come. He shall glorify Me : for He shall 
take of Mine, and shall declare it unto you." 
Behind the spiritual influence visible in 
nature and in the minds of men Christian- 
ity puts the personal God, the Father, 
revealed in a perfect humanity, absolutely 
one with the divine. ''Because we are sons,'' 
it says, '' God has sent forth the Spirit 
of His Son into our hearts, to hail Him, 
Father." Pantheism infused with morality 
is all around us. It recognizes a Spirit, 
invisible in its workings, secret, righteous, 
eternal ; a Father and a Son it does not 
know. Meanwhile the Church makes 
steadily, as she has made throughout the 
ages, her confession of faith : *' I believe 
in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of 
Life, who proceedeth from the Father and 



THE RELIGION OF MORALITY, 129 

the Son, who with the Father and the Son 
together is worshiped and glorified, who 
spake by the prophets." 

How often the doctrine has seemed 
strange, arbitrary, invented ! But let it 
go ; believe in a Spirit who proceeds from 
no Father and no Son, who has no source 
in absolute and loving Being, no relation to 
a Humanity manifest, once for all, as holy, 
and what certainty has life left? Where 
is a standard of conduct ; where salvation 
from sin? Gone is the assurance of abso- 
lute right, gone the quiet certainty that a 
Spirit proceeding from such right, far 
above our wistful hypotheses, is guiding 
us into all truth. Vaguely the mists close 
upon us, and man is left shut in upon him- 
self. Remove the doubt, repeat with joy- 
ous awe the Catholic confession, and the 
sunlight, not diffused, but direct, streams 
from the sun full upon our upturned brows. 
'' For the Lord is the Spirit," says St. 
Paul. 



VI. 
THE RELIGION OF CHRIST, 



O Luce eterna, che sola in te sidi, 
Sola t'intendi, e, da te intelletta, 
Ed intendente, te ami ed arridi ! 

Quella circulazion, che si concetta 
Pareva in te, come luce reflesso, 
Dagli occhi miei alquanto circonspetta, 

Dentro da se, del suo colore istesso, 
Mi parve pinta della nostra effige, 
Fer che il mio viso in lei tutto era messo. 

O Light Eternal, sole in Thyself that dwellest, 
Sole knowest Thyself, and known unto Thyself, 
And knowing, lovest and smilest on Thyself ! 

That circulation which, being thus conceived, 
Appeared in Thee as a reflected light. 
When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes, 

Within itself, of its own very color, 
Seemed to me painted with our effigy. 
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein. 

Farad i so XXXII I. , Longfellow^ s Translation. 



VI. 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 

By following with docility the three 
chief phases of modern agnostic thought 
we have been led into the presence of the 
threefold mystery which is the central 
glory of the Christian faith. 

To what avail? If the assumption be 
true that the faith of the future must retain 
no element susceptible of challenge, our 
thought and time have been lost. The 
Christian conception of God can never be 
demonstrated. To Dante, most exalted 
of CathoHc spirits, was granted the vision 
which we have found reflected in shadow 
by the very assertions of denial. The poet, 
gazing upon the threefold circle imprinted 
with the human image, dares with supreme 
audacity of thought to ask the hoWj the 



134 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

inner method of the union. Nor is the de- 
sire of the pure in heart refused. His 
mind, he tells us, is '' shaken by a flash,'' 
wherein '' its will comes to it." We wait 
and listen ; but alas ! ''All' alta fantasia qui 
manco possa" (''Here power fails the 
high imagining ") ; and the sacred poem, its 
long journey at an end, sinks abruptly into 
silence. 

Nor can we wonder. For the very 
content and meaning of faith, as conceived 
by Christianity, removes sight from pos- 
sible earthly experience ; and he who de- 
mands proof can never accept its witness. 

But if another assumption be true — and 
it is at least equally reasonable — if, as we 
claimed at the outset, the odds are in favor 
of that religion which meets most perfectly 
the cravings of the normal human soul, 
then we have summoned mighty witnesses, 
and their witness is agreed. In the Catho- 
lic faith, and there alone, the demands of the 
soul are met and its powers are set free. 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 135 

The doubt which has pervaded our cen- 
tury began, in the time of Voltaire, with a 
purely intellectual and logical skepticism. 
Then came democracy ; then came modern 
science ; then came the higher criticism 
with its challenge of historic documents ; 
and the great sequence of doubt was com- 
plete. 

But in the very heart of the movement 
of doubt we have watched the birth of a 
reaction toward faith. A faith it has been, 
visible only in the night-time, a mere halo 
of reflected Hght, which has invaded and 
revealed the dark shadows of denial. Of 
this dim faith we have traced the wistful, 
significant progress. The thought which 
discards God is for a moment only exultant. 
Soon it reahzes that in all the glorious 
phantasmagoria of nature there is no in- 
spiration in living, no comfort in dying. We 
see it, with the pitiful sense of loss upon it, 
seeking if haply it may find. And first it 
tries to form for itself a religion out of its 



136 THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 

very negation, and it cries aloud to the void ; 
but there comes no answer. Next, thrown 
back upon himself, man tries to find in 
that very self the object of worship, the 
inspiration to conduct; but the attempt is 
like trying to lift one's ovv^n body, unaided, 
from the ground. Finally, impressed by 
a revival of the historical sense, recogniz- 
ing, however reluctantly, that the faith of 
the past reached mightier results than the 
negation of the present, men seek to return 
in sentiment while advancing in conviction. 
They keep the forms of faith while sacrific- 
ing its content, and seek to emphasize the 
spiritual life while they deny the Spirit of 
God. But clear-eyed honesty cries shame 
upon them, and they leave us still earth- 
holden, met, if we lift up our eyes, by blank 
cloud, instead of by One who dwelleth in 
the heavens. 

Within the limits of pure agnosticism — 
of the sweeping assumption that a perso- 
nal God cannot be known to men — what 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 137 

further solution could be offered? The 
agnostic mo\'ement is integral and com- 
plete. The abyss; humanity; the abstract 
moral law — these things are knowable. 
Here is the universe of the agnostic ; here, 
if anywhere, must he seek salvation. He 
has sought; he has pressed each of these 
ideas to yield its full spiritual content ; 
does the result, separately or united, re- 
spond to the human need? 

In the consciousness of modern men 
these differing attitudes cross and recross 
in blended light and shade, with variety as 
infinite as that of human nature itself. 
Yet it is strange — it is also amazing — to 
watch the interrelation of the schools of 
agnostic thought. Identical in primary 
assumption, running into one another by 
gradations so delicate as to be almost 
invisible, there has been between their 
exponents a bitter and ceaseless war. The 
air of modern England has been hot with 
the breath of their controversy, and dark- 



138 THE M/ITNESS OF DENIAL 

ened with the flight of their missiles. 
Pure individuahsm reigns among them. 
In the pages of ancient Nineteenth CenttL- 
rieSy Spencer and Harrison may be found 
fighting a duel a oiit7'anee; scientist heaps 
opprobrium on Positivist, and the Positivist 
replies — getting rather the best of it — with 
unsparing ridicule and unsweetened con- 
tempt. Theories give place to personalities 
before the end. Arnold, meantime, wan- 
ders about as a sharp-shooter, branding 
both combatants as Phihstines, and aiming 
indiscriminately the arrowy darts of scorn. 
The little episode is typical. With much 
talk of soUdarity, with many attempts to 
shape new churches, the agnostics flock by 
themselves. 

Yet, above the voices of despair, of scoff, 
of complacency, of desire, is heard, steady, 
clear, undaunted, the unchanged confession 
of faith of the Catholic Church. And in 
this great confession, which gathers up 
into itself the highest wisdom of a mighty 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 139 

literature, the truths revealed through 
sweep of centuries to a nation that could 
hear — in this confession are recognized all 
needs discovered by modern men. The de- 
mand for reverent recognition of encom- 
passing mystery ; the yearning for a nature 
akin to our own which can receive love and 
exact obedience ; the honor of a moral 
force working through history and setting 
free the soul from world and self — all 
these are recognized, met, and fused by 
the faith in the Father, Son, and Spirit, 
one God, world without end. Here, and 
here alone, the complex search of the 
century finds answer; here ''all strife is 
reconciled, all pain beguiled." The sense 
of an infinite Unknown quickened by scien- 
tific thought can waken in the soul some- 
thing akin to adoration ; it offers no ap- 
peal to the moral nature nor summons to 
the deed. The reHgion of humanity does 
hold incentive to action ; but it permits 
no worship, for it forbids sight to rise 



140 THE WITNESS OF DENIAL 

above its own level. The religion of 
tendencies recognizes righteousness as 
alone eternal; but it meets the need of 
concrete life with abstract truth. Add all 
these phases of thought — as, indeed, they 
blend often in a single consciousness, with 
result perplexed and strange — still we have 
offered us no assured standard of right, no 
answer to the mystery of pain, the deeper 
mystery of sin. The God in whom we 
believed of old, the Father of Light and 
Love, is lost to us ; we find in His place a 
universe of matter and of law. But the 
cry of life can be satisfied by a Life alone. 
In the Rehgion of Christ, and there only, 
are met all those demands to which thought 
severed from Christ is driven — for an 
Object of Worship which shall transcend 
knowledge, for an Ideal thoroughly subject 
to knowledge, for a living Power so work- 
ing in the soul with secret might that this 
Ideal may inspire us, not with despair, but 
with courage. Thus is force revealed as 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 141 

loving, humanity as holy, and the moral 
law as divine. This is the assurance, won- 
drous, yet by the very witness of denial 
less wondrous than essential, brought to 
the world by Jesus Christ. 

" Turn us again, O God of hosts, show 
the light of Thy countenance ; and we 
shall be whole." '' How long wilt Thou 
forget me, O Lord? forever? how long 
wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?" 
*' Up, Lord, why sleepest Thou ? awake, 
and be not absent from us forever." '' Thou, 
O Lord God, art the thing that I long 
for." '' Like as the hart desireth the 
water-brooks, so thirsteth my soul after 
Thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, 
yea, even for the living God : when shall I 
come to appear before the presence of God ? 
My tears have been my meat day and night, 
while they daily say unto me, Where is now 
thy God? " '' My soul thirsteth for Thee, 
my flesh also longeth after Thee in a barren 
and dry land, where no water is/' 



142 THE JVITNESS OF DENIAL 

Such has been the cry of the human 
soul from the very dawn of history ; such 
is its cry to-day. It has been the cry, not 
in disease, but in heahh. When hfe is 
strongest, when civilizations are in their 
vigorous, early prime, when individuals are 
most intensely and healthfully sensitive to 
the world around them — these are the 
times when consciousness of God is clear. 
In morbid and abnormal days, in the 
decadence of a nation, a race, or a soul, 
there may be diseased subtlety and lovely 
hues of death, but the craving for God is 
weakened. A symptom of vigor, of full- 
ness of life, it cannot, by the scientific 
temper, be ignored. The highest result of 
evolution, it must have some objective 
correlative. It is in vain that those who 
deny call on us to find peace and energy 
in a doubt. Out of the very depth of 
denial speaks the witness of the shadows ; 
a reflected light mingles with the darkness, 
and the needs of the soul are shown to be 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 143 

eternal by the very men who reject most 
forcefully the eternal satisfaction of those 
needs. 

We have other witness to the light be- 
sides this faint and sorrowful witness of 
shadow. There has been delicate, signifi- 
cant reaction all along, within the strictest 
limits of the agnostic movement; there 
has been a stronger reaction apart from 
the movement altogether, by thought 
which discards the agnostic assumption 
and returns, consciously or not, to a super- 
natural basis. The force of this reaction, 
independently of the churches, is evident 
if we look at literature. It is yet more 
visible in the tone of thought all around 
us. Uncompromiising rigor of denial be- 
comes less and less popular; a return to 
theistic conceptions is more and more 
marked ; and the vogue of wild and crude 
philosophies, avowedly from the East, or 
originating one hardly knows where in 
thought's provincial byways, witnesses to 



144 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL. 

the insistent demand for genuine and sin- 
cere faith in the Spirit, and to reaction to- 
ward even an unsafe and unbalanced mys- 
ticism on the part of a generation which 
was assuredly drawn for a brief moment 
toward a material interpretation of life. 

Among all the shifting phases of modern 
spiritual thought and passion there is one 
which has remained constant, which no 
attack has been able to shake, which con- 
troversy does but intensify, which may 
well be both center and starting-point for 
the positive faith of the future. It is the 
attitude toward the Lord of the Church. 
For, through all its conflict, all its denial, 
the nineteenth century will not let Christ 
go. Eighteen hundred years ago lived 
and died this Galilean working-man. Since 
then our univ^erse has been enlarged by 
the discoveries of countless worlds, our 
minds enriched by new arts, sciences, phi- 
losophies, new knowledge of the history of 
our race. Still the eyes of the Aryan 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 145 

world remain fixed on this one Man — a 
Man obscure in life, ignominious in death. 
Still this gracious Figure, shining down 
the centuries, draws the hearts and 
thoughts of men supremely to Himself. 
Christ came to bring the message of a 
Father above, of a Spirit within, saving us 
unto life eternal. This message men dis- 
card. Nay, the very record of Christ's life 
and death they criticize in its every detail, 
reducing the gospel story to a mosaic of 
legend and sentiment in which fragments 
of truth may with difficulty be discerned. 
Christ's message they disbelieve, His story 
they distrust. Yet this mythical character, 
this Jesus of Nazareth, of whom we know 
next to nothing, whose intellectual con- 
ceptions are childishness to enlightened 
days — this obscure Jew is the center of 
human experience to-day, as for eighteen 
hundred years He has been the center of 
human history. Concerning His nature men 
quarrel ; His historic existence they doubt ; 



146 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

but escape Him they cannot. Agnostic of 
every order — scientist, ethicist, apostle of 
culture, man of art — all bow before Him 
in utter reverence, as they hail Him Master 
of the human race. 

Ours, we said at the outset, has been a 
century of the inner life. The eighteenth 
century, apart from a limited area, ques- 
tioned far less than we, but it believed 
less intensely. To us are given the signs 
of a new life, new yet old. Denial has 
spent its force. In its very depths was a 
witness full yet faint, as the cries of the 
soul claimed unconsciously element after 
element of the faith which it discarded. 
Meanwhile the fervent reaction toward 
theism, the reassertion of the Spirit, the 
devotion to the person and the teaching of 
Christ, all whisper promise of the day to be. 

What of the Christian Church? As the 
movement toward belief has developed, 
directly and indirectly, without her limits, 
has she been stagnant or still? 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 147 

Surely not. Yet in grief and grave 
regret her own children must be first to 
arraign her for her shortcomings. To- 
ward each phase of denial the Church in 
England opposed at first a blank antag- 
onism. She met the skepticism of the 
eighteenth century with an appeal to 
respectability and the Establishment. In 
the ardent social aw^akening of the Revo- 
lution she stood selfishly for alliance with 
the old social order. She confronted the 
eager discoveries of science with the literal 
authority of an infaUible Book ; and since, 
by a certain poetic justice, the higher criti- 
cism, with keen historical analysis, has 
denied this authority, she has too often 
fallen back on simple self-assertion. 

She has her reward. The appeal to 
authority wath which she has met each 
new cry of freedom falls dead upon our 
ears. Men may and do seek thankfully 
the shelter of the Church ; they are guided 
thither by no orthodox traditions, but by 



148 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

individual prayer and struggle. They may 
and must, in choosing their creed, be deeply 
influenced by the faith of the past ; but that 
faith is to them a form, not of authority, 
but of testimony. In matters rehgious as 
in matters social we must form our creeds 
for ourselves. If the blessing of faith is 
granted us it is because our own ears have 
heard a Voice, on our own path a Light 
has shined. The power of the Church is 
yet mighty, but her old prestige is gone. 
She speaks with no lack of assurance, but 
henceforth she must convince before she 
can command. 

Yet this change is no loss to the Church 
of Christ; it is surely rather gain. Shak- 
ing aside '' tlie torpor of assurance," she 
has risen in renewed vigor of life. From 
the time of Coleridge, indeed, from whom 
she received so sharp an intellectual stimu- 
lus, her sluggishness was at an end. In 
the Oxford Movement came a sudden 
and mighty spiritual revival. In the 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 149 

movement, less formal, but no less vital, 
inaugurated by Frederic Denison Maurice 
the spiritual emphasis was reinforced for 
the first time by the social, and the church 
gained the inspiration of new and more 
exacting ideals. Since the time of Maurice 
that social renascence, which is also essen- 
tially a Christian renascence, has steadily 
gained momentum. It has become the 
dominant spiritual fact in the closing cen- 
tury-decade, and bids fair to be the great 
and living interest leading us into the 
world of the future. Toward this social 
renascence what will be the attitude of the 
Church of Christ? Now is her hour of 
trial. One hundred years ago a like test 
was offered her and she failed. To-day 
the opportunity is hers once more. How 
will she meet it? 

Hints of the answer come in each new 
phase of the industrial crisis ; but in full it 
is not yet given. Yet surely we need not 
doubt nor fear. One hundred years ago 



150 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

there lay behind the Church a century of 
respectability and indolence. To-day there 
lies behind her a century of life. Challenge 
and attack have roused her, fierce heart- 
searchings have shaken her, intellectual 
prestige has deserted her, social prestige is 
no longer tied exclusively to her train. Free, 
she is learning to rejoice in her freedom ; 
poor, in her poverty ; while her very rejec- 
tion by the proud in spirit and intellect may 
well teach her to turn to those whom she 
has neglected, but among whom her true 
home is to be found — the ignorant, the 
oppressed, and the humble. A mighty 
future lies, if she will, before her. Her ex- 
ternal authority is gone. A necessary safe- 
guard in her youth, she can dispense with 
it in her maturity. Her attitude of hostility 
to other thought is ceasing also. The fear 
of doubt is an evil form of doubt ; for 

'' The man who feareth, Lord, to doubt, 
In that fear doubteth Thee." 

From Christianity all modern faith, how- 



THE RELIGION OF CHRIST. 151 

ever unconsciously, springs; to Cliristianity 
it must return. The sense of finite igno- 
rance, the passionate love for men, the rec- 
ognition of force making for righteousness 
— all these, with their colored and partial 
'glory, unite in the white and simple light 
of the Christian faith. And in the ideal 
Church of Christ are found waiting the 
means by which these great truths may 
be made part of the daily life of men. 
Through her the glory of the Infinite is re- 
vealed to that humanity which, standing at 
the height of natural evolution, serves as a 
meeting-place between the material and the 
divine. In her as the family of brethren, 
nay, the very body of Christ, is fully re- 
alized the collective conception of the race 
as an organic whole. Her great sacraments 
present not only types of spiritual truth, 
but channels through which the influx of 
the Spirit of righteousness may purify and 
feed the human soul. No ecclesiastical or- 
ganization to force faith on reluctant minds, 



152 THE IVITNESS OF DENIAL 

no club to formulate a dogmatic theology 
or to unite men in practical beneficence, 
but the mighty mother who feeds her chil- 
dren with the very bread of life, the Church 
Catholic may in the future command al- 
legiance, not by the claims she asserts, but 
by the power she reveals; not by an au- 
thority imposed from without, but by a life 
manifest from within. 

O Spirit, Purifier from all sin, purify the 
inward eyes of our nature, that we may 
see the Light of Truth, and by His light 
may see the supreme Father, whom none 
but the pure in heart may behold. Come, 
O blessed Spirit, for Jesus' sake. Amen. 



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